dyl.anjon.es

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@DropboxSupport Nice one thanks - I'll give it a spin now

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@monzo dropped my card on the floor https://t.co/lIbO5zp2lF

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@monzo Don't worry, got myself one of these https://t.co/THaVQTBnXE

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@bt_uk Is this March date a ruse? Don't you think 8-months is too long to deliver a product you said I could have? https://t.co/o64hjJjmkt

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@bt_uk No. Openreach have done all the hard work already outside months ago. Dug up 3 neighbours driveways, new duc… https://t.co/aFz6Bw5n5t

A Blog - Why?

Why have I decided to do this now?

A person asked me the other day if I had a blog, I said no. Now I can say for certain, yes!

Over the past months, I have been trying to put together a decent web presence where I can put my photos, my calender, documents, music, links, files and all that jazz. I have tried a few different things out - wordpress, dynamicDNS, 000webhost, google. They each have their merits and their annoyances so I really want to create something different!

My current project at the moment has a purpose! signpostyouthproject.info

I have had the opportunity to experiment with different things, PHP, jQuery, XHTML, Facebook Connect and all that kind of stuff. So far it's looking pretty good, although still lacking quite a lot of content. The A-Z of Drugs is coming along slowly while the video and audio blogs have come to a stand still.

So, that doesn't really answer my question of why a blog?

I think it is somewhere I have decided on, hopefully will stay in one place! Expect a running commentry on all my web development, mainly so that later in a few months when I decide - ooh I liked that particular thing when I did that, I know what I did and have some basis to google off! So for know - tara!

From my iPod

Hello!

I have found that I can just use my iPod to publish posts. Very slick.

A Few Days Out

Hello!

The past weekend has been crazy! - WOODSTOCK, Work and not sleeping have been the themes. I have just caught some sleep this past night.

Thursday work till late, go to ury to record show and set up for warm-up, locked out - fail.

Friday morning goto work, finish at 4 and head to ury to help with sessions. Success.

Finish sessions and start setting up for woodstock - success.

Sort out equipment for JCR stage 3 and then help put up gazebos outside - sleep on stage - semi-success!

Wake up ridiculously early and sort out wires, get all set up at station and in ob studio. Try and explain to presenters what everything does (not really listening - get a bit annoyed) go try and sort out multi-core for mixing - Fail!

But the day went very well, I had to go to work at 5pm so missed the evening party. Got locked in at work, broke out set the alarms off, got back in to silence them, had to stay until an engineer came out to fix it. Went to ury to pack up wires with Martynm home to bed for 4 hours and then went back to work!

Feel a bit drained

Moved Out

Well hello again, long time no speak!

I have successfully moved out of 121 and into storage. It was a bit of a mammoth task with Big D and everything but I made it. Thursday was Little D - live OB from outside Heslington Hall. It was really good fun. Had to go to work that evening 'till finish. Last shift before 'holiday'.

After work, went on to DJ at the silent disco at Big D - sooo much fun. Kicked ass.

Stayed up all night packing, getting pretty tired by this stage. Had 2 hours sleep, started moving things to storage at 8.30 AM. Finished by 11.30am and the massive cleanup ensued.

Took Alice to train station for 3.30, getting pretty very tired. Made it home to relax a little, have a sleep.

Woke up, cleaned and cooked, moved rest of my stuff up to URY for the week Made it to Sinclair's to give the keys and paperwork back, ate some cake there.

Went to URY, met Gareth - took the station off air and then indeed apart! I fell asleep around 2am, he kept going. Got up at 5 for train, fell asleep missed Shrewsbury stop, had to get bus from Hereford but made it back just about alive!

Looking forward to my few days here in Llandrindod! Boom, there you go!

Wales

So, still living it up in Llandrindod before I head back up North. While here I have made a lot of progress on Signpost. New content includes the 'Think Safe' section incorporating a drink unit calculator, drug of the month etc.

Visually some adjustments have been made too, the rounded corners have bit the dust until the official, compatible css comes out for IE. The stripped back background has gone and a yellow bigger background has appeared covering more of the page.

The only current problem seems to be content being fixed so that it doesn't get bigger with the page.

I have also re-tidyed the head - passing variables (title + description) by php did not work so titles + descriptions are set manually out on each page.

Would have liked to do some testing on the visual player but my laptop remains in safe-mode. Got it to boot up yesterday but then it over heated in the middle of torchwood and now we're back to basics :(

Until then....

Back to Blog

Hello there!

It's been a while but basically just moved house in York so it's taken a while to get everything back up and running now.

Here is the update. Artist Info on my website is coming along fabulously - if you go to dyl.anjon.es/music and enter an artist name you will get, photo, bio, releases, reviews, videos, events - what more could you want!

Signpost has had a re-shuffle towards the 3 coloumn layout they were looking for. Havn't tested it out on a widescreen display but I am quietly confident! It looks good and now has an added site feedback form.

I have the intention of adding the requested contact page and also 'fun & games' which hopefully incorporate more web based activities.

For now, tara x

An Update To Date

Hello all!

Just been to the cinema to see The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

It was really good actually. Enough action to psycological thriller for my liking. The characters were pretty likeable.

Webwise - I have been starting and scrapping a few things:

  1. 'Now Playing on URY' has been having quite a bit of success. Working on vista production machine-ish. Needs a bit more intelligence. When a song overlaps another etc, shouldn't be to hard to do but a working process thats on pause for a few days as I have dedicated all of this weeks nights to it and have turned into an owl.
  2. 'Visual Radio' - I have played around with hosting my own flash server, worked a little but needs to much config, power etc so going with the java .tv hosting site which works well. Going to add some seprate controls for poll, images and texting to make it less complicated. The spirit pc is streaming 24 hours a day S1 webcam, hasn't really failed yet! Although I just checked now and it's down -oops!
  3. Signpost - I have been trying out some upload scripts to see if we can create an admin interface to add photos. May have to use an external site such as picsa or whatever it's called. Would be better, more professional so that needs testing.
  4. Last.fm - I have joined and have added a URY account, hope to try and tie in the Now Playing information so to keep it updated.

Thats about it from me, work tomorrow 9-5 (don't rob me)

Love Dylan

I'm Back

Hello!

I'm sorry I've been away for so long but we are back to basics now. Started at the University of Leeds and am still working on making little web apps as a hobby.

Going to tidying up this site a bit so to perhaps get some more work If you're interested in hiring me out- feel free to contact me <- contact details

See ya!

Re-captcha code

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this is for signpostyouthproject.info - to avoid spam

Flickr

With our BT Broadband package, we have access to Flickr pro so I have begun uploading all my pics there where they are stored in their high resolution. With this it means, they no longer have to be hosted here so we shall see a migration towards a more specific photo gallery looking pretty neat. I'm either going to use a standard RSS feed for each set or going to have a delve into their API

Flickr Photo Feeds

These are going very nicely! I have a working prototype in my projects area. It currently has 4 albums but not all the photos show I think. Im about to count them now!

Adding openid to site

Hello!

You may or may not know that I use dyl.anjon.es as an OpenID- well I have been thinking of having a login portal on my site so people can use my projects for their own accounts.

For example, the LastFM app can show your info, you can access your flickr photos and share them etc.

So first thing to do was to get me able to authenticate someone via OpenID. Yesterday I was trying a few different php libraries to no real avail - there was always some include missing or in the wrong place.

Anywhom I decided on going to a 3rd party authenticator. This has meant there's a lot of to-ing the frowning of tokens and keys and what not.

On the bus this morning, I hope I have found the solution I was looking for. I needed to get the XML result of a http post:

$reply = curl_exec($ch); $xml = simplexml_load_string($reply);

This apparently won't work if the response is an array but I'll give it a bash in a bit in Leeds

Hooray!!!

Well, I have got it to work - OpenID on my site, give it a go!

I used the library that was the original suggestion offa the openid enabled site. It didn't take much editing, I have just used the example file. At the moment, when you initially log in you get given an id and your data is stored from sreg into my db, you the get a cookie which lets me know whom you are! If you sign in again, you have the same number and your details are stored.

A few things with this at the moment, your id will expire in 30mins; your data is not updated if it changes, some permissions need to be added and a db fetch function for name, birthday etc!!

OpenID Update

Hello!

On the site now you can log in with your OpenID, you will authenticate via your provider and then you are logged into my site until you press logout or you close your session (browser window). When logged in you are greeted by a currently ugly account page which shows you the data I hold against you from your OpenID. You can add to, edit, remove any of these from there. Any changes you make will only be specific to this website and not your OpenID. You can then use the network tool page to update your own social networking status, I'm going to add LastFM account field so that we can compare musical tastes; flickr account aswell to see some of your public photos too if you want.

I have started adding permission settings to pages that needed them: for example the network tool now only works if your logged in and have provided your social networking details; the podcast submission form is only accesible to what I'm calling level 9 permissions - which is currently me!

Any other ideas to share stuff for fun, let me know - drop me an e-mail dyl@anjon.es

Valid CSS

Hello, this site is now 100% valid CSS 2.1

Looking forward to CSS 3.0 with corners!

LastFM

So.... When you are logged in and have specified your LastFM username then my site works out our similar tastes in music providing a percentage to about 10 decimal places for some reason! If your not logged in our have not provided your LastFM details or of course you do not have LastFM then it just displays my information so do not worry about a blank page - dyl.anjon.es/music/listens

MEG Scheduler

I have done a mini project involving a scheduler system for assigning times for people. The user adds a persons details, then get assigned an id; the user can then edit the times the person is available and a relationship is given to that persons id and the time id. A calender is then written to check each timeslot for an available user and draws a picture. Very nice and colourful.

Big and Little Improvements

Merry Wednesday everyone!

Over the past couple of days there have been quite a few minor changes and some dig developments for dylanjones.info Firstly the little things:

i) The projects page now comes with a little description on each of the links via a little drop down (well, just appears at the moment) link. Try it out and suggest some improvements.

ii) Feedback - There is now a little feedback box on the right hand side, feel free to click it and see what it's all about

iii) Avatars - If you have one with gravatar then you will have it displayed next to your name. You must have the same e-mail address registered with me and gravatar

Secondly some of the major upgrades:

i) iPlayer - I use iPlayer to watch programmes. Previous attempts to record what I watch with cookies etc has been a hassle. So, I have added a new project - iPlayer Episodes (name to be changed soon). I have started recording the programme identifiers to my database and now use them to identify programmes that I have seen in a nice little (ever growing) table. Using PHP to read metadata from the BBC website, I have also got the title and description for each episode I watch and provide links back to iPlayer and /programmes on the BBC website. Further development to this will be coming soon, again suggestions welcome.

ii) The launch of the dylanjones.info API - Horray - more information will be along soon but for now just go have a play api.dylanjones.info

API and New Blog

Howdy!

You are reading my blog - hosted 100% on dylanjones.info with tags and comments gallore. Why?

I have been developing the API, I have so far completed track, photo, help, twitter, contact, password manager, user and just minutes ago blog.

If you visit api.dylanjones.info you can see exactly how you can access data through my API, everything is returned as xml as a result. You can make a query which has a method (the things mentioned above), an object and attribute. Not all methods have objects/attributes but all that can be seen from the help. The structure is easy peasy

api.dylanjones.info/method/object/attribute

and that's it!

One of the main features of the API is it's superfast as all it's returning is database entries. This is the main reason for the API - to access data outside of this website domain where you can't get into the database. I can now just make calls to the API from any domain and cache that for super speedy results.

The Blog - this is why I have had to recover all my blog posts from Google. I have taken the opportunity to put together a really fast and more superior blogging system that allows for tags and comments. With this now all posts are available straight from the address bar. Similar to the API, their is a very nice schematic way of accessing the blog.

  • dylanjones.info/blog takes you to the last 20 entries
  • dylanjones.info/blog/all gives you all posts
  • dylanjones.info/blog/tag/a tag gives you all posts relating to that tag
  • dylanjones/blog/id/34 is the unique url for each individual article

There may be even more ways of accessing posts in the future, we shall see. I shall see be posting to Google Blogger hopefully, this is a test post to see if it's possible - we'll have to see how all the html tags go down over on the other side.

As ever the code will be up and available eventually, I'm going to start editing and commenting code tomorrow with any luck after some revision.

Keep Watching!

QR Code Generator

Merry Christmas to you!

A little hint on what is going to be released in the next few days... more API...more music... more interactivity!

Firstly- a have just released a little tool for you to use QR Code Generator is just a nice easy tool for you and me to make image shortcuts. I have been trying it out on my phone with the same software that I had on my old Sony Ericcson i-nigma.

Secondly- I have been very busy databasing my music library. As with the blog, I am copying things to a MySQL database for easy peasy access to my content. This will feature on the API soon so look out.

Also been watching some hak5 and done a load of revision!

Linked Web

Linked Web Map

Hello!

I have been working hard to try and get everything linked and talking together. I have got a copy of all my tweets and tracks I play, wether it be on iPhone, PC, internet, LastFM etc. This is all copied over to db1 now and thus will be accessible through the API. I havn't quite got all the way - still to do is to check for new tweets and the API bit - but it's a work in progress.

With this data I will be coming up with a syncronised stats page eventually that will update itself making calls from the API, very nice!

HTML 5

I have also completed transferring the whole website over to HTML 5 - obviously with it still in development, a lot more changes need to be made but I'm currently going through the syntax and getting rid on 'divs'.

The picture above shows how linked my stuff is so far - I'm sure it will be expanding as time goes on!

A New Look - Standards

Visitors of dylanjones.info will have noticed a change in the 'tone' - haha - good one! It's gone all grey (or gray in CSS terms)

With this week quite quiet except for revision, I have had some time to sort the pages out, tidy up some of the old stuff and bring in the new. The main reason for doing so is standards compliance. I have looked into my crystal ball to see what is up and coming and thought ahead so to keep this version of the framework lasting a long time. The answer was clear: HTML 5

I have converted all my output to the HTML 5 Spec (draft) so when it does come - I'm ready!

"But if it is not a here- why use it?"

The main reason is, most decent browsers have HTML 5 support. By decent I mean Firefox, Chrome, Safari. If you are using Internet Explorer then I'm not sure what you'll see when you load this website.

"What is new then?"

The doctype (not very interesting), the header and nav elements are being put to use; I am looking forward to experimenting with databse, location, audio, video and canvas tags in the coming future.

So with all this I went along and checked, re-checked and indeed validated all my pages. Obviously my lovely web hosting service (000 Webhost) have decided to add a script to the end of all my files outside of the end html tag so that throws up 2 errors but all my stuff is clean! I am now also WAI compliant - meaning that I am accessible to everyone (with a decent browser).

I will introduce a bit of colour (color in CSS) soon but for now I'm going to validate all my API output for standard RSS viewers to be able to display the information rather than having people to develop their own reader. I will document this when it arrives.