By Dan | February 23, 2007
World cup ticket for St Lucia
I’m going. How great will that be, two world cups in one year; rugby and cricket – the two greatest sports on Earth!
By Dan | February 11, 2007
Corinne's website - Ourpasthistory.com
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….
By Dan | December 27, 2006
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.
By Dan | November 29, 2006
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….
By Dan | September 18, 2006
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.
By Dan | September 17, 2006
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….
By Dan | September 13, 2006
I’m on leave from the British Museum at the moment, so I am using it to do something more useful. So I’ve been surfing the web, looking for a car to buy (at the moment it is looking like a second hand Lotus Elise), a new house (bored with mine) and avoiding doing work as I get tempted whilst out of office!I’ve just got back from the Loire valley, where I managed to find some decent white wine, some cheap champagne and some rather nice method traditionelle Vouvray. I also might have got snapped speeding near Calais (although the cameras can’t get you here until next year.) Whilst I’m on the subject of France. What sort of place has supposedly 24 hour petrol pumps that are unmanned and don’t let you use overseas credit cards? I’ll let you work that one out.
Holiday is stacking up at the moment, I’ve accumulated 58 days over the last couple of years, and I’m going to make use of it this time. Off to Libya to partake in some Roman ruin viewing during November, New Year in Herefordshire, February skiing in France and then who knows. That’s still around 40 days to use. Perhaps I should work 2 day weeks for a bit. Next challenge Bank Of England rugby this Saturday.
Well I’ve had this domain for rather along time now, and so far it’s just been my experimentation zone. It holds test websites, my photo collections and various Content management systems that I’m trying out; they are all developed on PHP.
However, it is probably now time to get it working properly and use it for something useful. Well, maybe not…
So what’s been going on recently, well my brother has decided to get married, more fool him and it was a good day out. Catholic Mass followed by huge reception, followed by boozy party.
Finds @ www.finds.org.uk by me.
