7 Pillars of Wisdom

Wedding directions

Dan — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 14:24:03 +0000

I’ve created this google map of wedding directions. You can print this one off more easily and do driving instructions more easily.

View Larger Map

The map above shows all the vital locations for the wedding on the 29th September. Have a click around on the icons and you will find that the beds are hotels, the cocktail glasses the pubs, the masks the wedding, the pin the church and the transport icons signify the trains and bus.

If you still can’t get this to work drop me a line.

St Lucia - yeaaah maan! No pressure, no problem

Dan — Tue, 01 May 2007 18:30:22 +0000

Just got back from the Island of St Lucia, what a brilliant place. We stayed at the Sandals Halcyon in the North of the Island. Everything they had to offer we tried: windsurfing, water skiing (crap at that!), scuba diving - 109 dives now, tennis, shuffleboard, eating, cocktails, patois etc. We also went to the semi-final of the world cup, even though they had lost my tickets. The ground is really beautiful, makes me want to perhaps start playing again.

Oh well, now back to the drag of work at the British Museum. A couple of weeks till we launch a revamped CCI and try out the mashed up features that I’ve built around Google and phpclasses. Could be interesting.

British Institute of Persian Studies

Dan — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 22:40:29 +0000

After a few months of on-off work, I’ve finally finished the British Institute of Persian studies website. It has taken a bit longer than I expected as we’ve had to get comments from various stake holders on the committee of the Institute. I’m actually quite pleased with it and I’m getting more pleased with textpattern as a web content management platform all the time. I’ve also started using a vitual server at oneandone which seems pretty good value for around £19 pcm.

The website has two domains, bips.org.uk and bips.ac.uk (we’re not totally sure about future directions for this.) Any feedback on this gratefully received. Now onto the ICOMON website which will be trilingual. Bit less time to do this one though! Maybe I’ll burn a candle as usual from both ends and the middle (I’m also working on some Iron Age data at work at present… but that is a secret….)

Returned from skiing

Dan — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 23:13:08 +0000

Just got back from 7 days of skiing in the Alpine resort of Serre Chevalier. I’ve now managed to come down red runs after 10 days of practice; they’re hard man! An interesting trip with loads of snow and some strange concoctions called Dr Pepper.

Stu Ervine took some great photos, and they can be seen on Flickr.

Cricket world cup

Dan — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 14:50:29 +0000

I’m going.

Another textpattern site

Dan — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 11:23:54 +0000

This week, I’ve been helping out Corinne Mills with the upgrade of her website entitled “Our Past History”. Corinne has been a great supporter of the Scheme that I work for at the British Museum and she’s just started to dabble with content Management Systems and plumped for textpattern. I’ve been using this for a number of sites recently and it’s great once you get the hang of it! Anyway, her site is now configured and is available at http://ourpasthistory.com It rocks!

The site also consumes RSS feeds directly from the PAS database - she therefore has a feed to all her finds down the side of her homepage which is powered by the excellent simplepie plugin. I’ve got a couple more txp sites to come soon….

Experiments

Dan — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 10:38:27 +0000

I’m just building a new website for the British Institute of Persian Studies to replace their old one . And I’ve been experimenting with adding Google and flickr to the basic Textpattern driven content management system. I haven’t gone down a plugin path for this, instead I’ve used a really good idea from David Ramos and adapted this to suit my idea for mapping research articles and archaeological site notes. The current website doesn’t offer this content (sites), so the information is currently lifted directly from Wikipedia and the Institute’s scholars may wish to expand it and correct Wikipedia’s errors if they exist. The basic result can be seen on my dev server version and has resized infowindows, short excerpts from the info, geo co-ordinates and a direct output (&output=kml) to Google Earth. I’m trying to decide whether mouseover or click is the best usability model for this interface, I am leaning towards the click as it allows you to focus better.
The last thing that I think I’ll do is add custom markers using the Society logo as the pointer but I need to be back in the office as I don’t have any image editing software on my macbook (any open source packages anyone can suggest?) So does the integration add value to this website? I think it helps visualise the locations that get mentioned in the text of the site.
I’ve learnt quite alot from these pages produced by the Blackpool Community Church JavaScript Team and the results are useful. Maybe I’ll do something with this for the Scheme’s website running data direct from the database.

The other thing that I’ve played with is 24Ways tutorial on parsing JSON data from flickr’s API to add value to the website and draw in current photos of Iran, Persia and archaeological sites. I’ve not done and JSON stuff before, but I like the result! As mentioned in the article, this output is at present undocumented, but seems a lot faster than the RSS method I use. You are still limited to how many photos you pull out and I can’t see how to just use Creative Commons licensed data as yet. So once again, like the google implementation, it is hard coded into one of Textpattern’s template pages that drive a section. For a simple CMS, Textpattern offers some great functions and is extensible. Better meta data handling would be great and a better image management or inbuilt gallery would also be brilliant. However, it suits my needs for projects like this.
Of course the Institute might hate it, and the design is still up for discussion but as it is CSS driven easy to change, I’m going to add some sand and desert plants to the background and the blues denote the sky. I’ve also started to build in microformats and I’ve also used zenphoto gallery for images (all temporary from the lovely Vesta Curtis) and I’m starting to integrate the forum software into the CMS.

Anyway, comments gratefully received….even if you hate it or think it could be improved. I’m still just dabbling with this technology lark.

Libya and bike crashes

Dan — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 21:51:56 +0000

I’ve not updated for a while, but I’ve just returned from Libya after a whirlwind 5 day visit via Voyages Jules Verne. This encompassed trips to Tripoli, Sabratha and Leptis Magna. The latter 2 magnificent examples of Roman town planning. However Leptis is by far and away the more impressive and reminded me of my youth and summer time in Caesarea, Israel. We stayed at Hotel Yousser in Tripoli and I sure did miss my Gin and Tonic seeing as it is a dry country; however their non alcoholic beer isn’t that bad! However, I almost didn’t make it there due to a high speed crash on my mountain bike. All I can say is the pavement is bloody hard when you hit face first….

Official photos - bro’s wedding

Dan — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 09:33:24 +0000

Dapper photographs of Nick and Rachel’s wedding can now be purchased direct from the photographic clown who covered their big day. They can be seen here:

www.cdouglasphoto.co.uk/pett

Here’s a sample of the mafia at work.

Rugby season begins (for me at least…)

Dan — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 16:45:05 +0000

Hampstead took on Bank of England at their palatial HQ on Saturday, and with a rather makeshift pack we managed to win 22 - 17 courtesy of a last minute converted try. I’m suffering today as we were under alot of pressure at scrums, regularly retreating several metres. We did however manage 5 against the head, mainly due to ponderous hooking by my opposite number.I hadn’t planned to play much this year, but the team was desperate so I played.

A couple of seasons ago, Bank were quite a force. I guess either visas ran out or they have all decamped to London South Africa, totseins. Nice to finally beat them at their place.

Reading the paper today, Bath and Northampton seemed to have been winding each other up. Or at least that’s what a crowd member alleged. Neither side seemed to hear the racial abuse, mystifying…. Harks back to the supposed racial abuse of Epi Taione of Newcastle a couple of seasons ago. We’ll have to wait and see what happens there. I have a feeling not much will come of it.

I was going to venture to the not so delightful wilds of Watford to watch Saracen’s give a debut to Andy Farrell; decided not to as tickets are extortionate. They thumped Newcastle, so I didn’t miss much.

No rugby next weekend….