Refresh Teesside is stronger than ever and is growing at a pace that we never believed it would. The feedback so far has been amazing and it would seem that everyone who has attended an event has gone away and spread the word!

The number of people attending the events has been steady which is unheard of for events like this. Each month we are reaching more and more people and the enthusiasm is growing.

Last month we contacted you to ask you to share the news about the Refresh events, and you did it! The coverage over the last month has been amazing. Thanks to your support we have managed to secure the venue for the foreseeable future. Not only this, but we have managed to secure a sponsor for the next three months which will enable us to offer free food at the next three months at the very least.

New event format

This month we hope that we are going to see a slight change in the format of the events.

6 – 6.30pm : Registration
6.30pm : Welcome & announcements
6.30 – 7pm : Networking
7 – 7.30pm : Member spotlight *NEW*
7.30 – 8pm : Food
8pm : Prize draw
8 – 9pm : Networking

This new format will see each monthly event focussing on a member of Refresh Teesside. This is open to anyone who has attended an event in the past. The time can be spent teaching, sharing knowledge, advertising, highlighting a service they offer or anything else like this.

Prize draw and goodies

So far we have had a prize draw every month which has seen prizes including t-shirts from GitHub and Brightbook, bottles of Champagne from Sharpe Recruitment, key-toppers from Waze, stickers and all sorts of other goodies. Hopefully we can keep this going! Any contributions or ideas would be welcome.

Wifi access

For future events we aim to supply free wifi so we encourage you to bring laptops and make the most of it. Live coverage from the event really helps with the buzz of Refresh Teesside and we can show others what they are missing by not attending.

Future ideas/development

We just wanted to mention a couple of things looking into the future. We want Refresh Teesside to branch out. We are in discussion with a couple of members about running a workshop event which will see a number of beginners workshops running at the same time possibly in the same location. So far I am talking to people about running workshops on Codeigniter, Ruby on Rails and jQuery. We are also very keen on running a ‘Hack Day’ which will see us all getting together over a set time period to produce a new website for a charity from scratch. More to be discussed at a later date… please get in touch with your ideas.

Signup to the May event now! Wednesday 9th May 2012

We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday!

I was chatting to Alex Akass on skype the other day and he pointed me to the Ordnance Survey website who have just released a full set of UK postcodes in a database as recent as February 2012! The service, called Code-Point Open (ordnancesurvey.co.uk) contains 2,993,351 rows. This data also looks to be available on the new data.gov.org beta site under the same name Code-Point Open (data.gov.uk).

The data comes in CSV files to split the data up. I created a quick PHP script that looped through these files and put all the postcodes into one database table. All looks good.

This got me thinking. The database comes with ‘Postcode’, ‘Eastings’ & ‘Northings’ columns. There must be something you can run Eastings and Northings through to get the latitude and longitude. I did a quick Google and found a post by a guy called samjudson on this forum.

I searched for my postcode in the database and then ran the Northings and Eastings through this function to get the latitude and longitude. I used itouchmap.com to load this data on the map and compared it with the pointer that got shown on the map when I inputted my postcodes directly. They were very close, close enough to be useful I think.

So what I was thinking, was I could add the conversion function to my php script and whilst I am looping through the csv files I could also add the latitude and longitude and I will end up with a current table with full UK postcode, Eastings, Northings, Latitude & Longitude.

Would welcome thoughts…

Refresh Teesside meet at 6pm on the second Wednesday of every month. We meet in the function room upstairs at Capaldi’s Restaurant, Linthorpe Road, Middlesbrough.

In Teesside there are hundreds of creative businesses who can benefit from knowing each other. Many of the businesses are relatively small in size, focusing on a specific skill or service. Everyone can benefit from knowing other professionals in their own trades and networking with other professionals who offer skills and services they may require in the future.

Registration will be between 6 and 6.30pm. We will greet you and ensure you are registered. At 6.30pm there will be an introduction to the event with any announcements. After this, it’s up to you to get out of the event what you want.

There will be developers with their laptops out sharing code and working on problems. There will be freelance developers and designers looking to connect with agencies. There will be photographers looking to offer their services to others. There will be business owners who may be recruiting. Most importantly there will be creative people networking with their peers.

There will be light food, kindly provided by Capaldi’s, during the evening. The bar will be open. The event officially finishes at 9pm.

We look forward to seeing you there, if you have any questions then send us a tweet or an email.

To register for the event please go to the Refresh Teesside Eventbrite page

If you would like to find out more information about future events then please bookmark our official website.

Other links that you may find interesting:

• Refresh Teesside Facebook page
• Refresh Teesside Twitter page
• Refresh Teesside Google Group
• refresh Teesside LinkedIn group
• Refresh Teesside Last.fm group

This is not the greatest bit of code I have ever written and its not going to knock you over with complexity but what it will do is save your little fingers and over a year give you back quite a large chunk of time.

function output($my_array, $my_die = 0)
{
	echo '<hr />';
	echo '<pre>';
	print_r($my_array);
	echo '</pre>';
	echo '<hr />';

	if ($my_die == 1) { die(); }
}

Then all you have to do is

output($my_string);
output($my_array);

I have been involved with web development for around 10 years now. Sounds surprising but it’s true. My life/job has involved many things as well as pure web development. I have been involved with core business projects such as setting up a business, accounting and marketing as well as project and client management. When it comes to web development, my day to day activities include working with HTML, XHTML, CSS, PHP, Photoshop, WordPress, Magento, MySQL along with server setup and management. I call myself a php web developer because that is what I do most and what I love most; however I am really  a jack of all trades.

For most of the projects I have worked on I have been either the sole developer or the senior developer. Everything that I know about PHP has been self taught, everything has been trial and error. I did go to Teesside University and studied Information Technology which touched on some web development; however in my opinion the University need to seriously sort itself out when it comes to our industry, its shocking… but thats a blog/rant for another day.

Throughout my life as a developer, I been involved with many different sized project and when you don’t have another developer to bounce ideas off you learn quickly. It is also very easy for you to slip into bad habits. When you are planning a project you have to assume that your doing things the best way. You don’t want to show a ‘weakness’ and ask other developers if you are doing something the right way! After sometime, I realized I was reusing my own code over and over again in new projects. Therefore,  I started to comprise a folder of all the functions, classes, html templates and css that I would usually have to write from scratch for each project. At the time I did not realise this was known in the industry as a ‘framework’. By the time I came across frameworks such as Codeigniter, Zend and Kohana, I was too involved in my own framework. I had also made contact with other PHP developers online who were dead against using frameworks… ‘frameworks go against what PHP is’… ‘frameworks will slow down your system’… ‘frameworks contain loads of pointless code’… ‘frameworks will slow your development down’… the list goes on and on… so I got a bit stuck! I knew my own framework inside out, it was quick, it worked… why use anything else? PHP is all about using core PHP… thats what its all about… right?

One sunny day a guy called Alex Akass encouraged me to start to use an open source frmaework. I should mention that I have never met Alex in person; however we speak nearly every day on Skype. I may be a sole developer but I do have a solid development team made up of contacts I have met online and more recently at such events as PHPNE. Alex introduced me to Codeigniter and I started to use it for a live project. I work in an agency where project turnover is high. I don’t have the luxury of time to look at new technology and work on something inhouse to test it before working on a live client project. I trusted Alex and I dived in. Since that day my life has changed in so many ways. To list a few:

• More structured framework
• Input from years and years of other developers experience
• Access to functions and classes I would never have thought of
• Much more reliable and stable final projects
• Faster project development…. much faster!
• A shed load of online blog and video tutorials
• The feeling I am up-to-date
• etc…

I could go on and on… however there is one thing that is missing from the list above which has rocked my world. When I started to use Codeigniter I started to see that things were not so different to the structure I had put in place for my own framework. Things I had created functions for were included in Codeigniter. It was an amazing feeling. The years I have been working on my own learning from trial and error were not wasted. I did know what I was doing! I feel as if I owe this feeling of validation to Alex and the creators of Codeigniter. Since making the jump to Codeigniter,  every day I have had on development has been even more enjoyable than before. If there is anyone out there waiting to make the jump, stop waiting… jump! You are not alone.

Recently I have been attending PHPNE events in Newcastle. I spend an hour traveling there and back on the train so that I can join the others in the pub after the talk to network. Its been a real eye opener for me. I really enjoy meeting and talking to other developers. Today I am extremely excited because I have just put a blog post live on the PHPNE website announcing our October event… Phil Sturgeon will be giving an introduction on FuelPHP, a new ‘kick ass’ (the words he used when I was talking to him on Friday night at the #NENT event) framework he is part of.

Why am I so excited? Two reason. Firstly, Phil is a leading developer on Codeigniter. Codeigniter changed my life. Secondly I have recently been getting a lot of ear ache from Chris Scott telling me that I should take a look at Ruby on Rails, talking to me about things like migrations, ORM and HAML… Phil is also a leading developer on FuelPHP… and guess what… Fuel introduces things like ORM and migrations and has support for things like HAML…

If you are interested in attending the event you will need to be quick because spaces are limited. Head to the PHPNE website for more information and register on EventBrite asap.

A while ago I started to try a new mail client called Postbox. I have used Microsoft Outlook all my life but I was not happy with the way it grouped messages and since I am an iPhone user and really like the way that messages are grouped by subject, this has become a key thing to me. I also wanted to move away from Microsoft. Postbox have been releasing updates quite often since I started using it and the most recent update make the hole thing look and work amazingly so I am more than happy and would recommend it to anyone.

One thing that has been a little problem is the way it manages contacts. I did have a very robust way of backing up and syncing my contacts between all my devises. I have an iPhone, iPad, Laptop, work desktop and home desktop.

I now focus my sync around Google contacts. If you keep all your contacts in Google you can then link your iPhone/iPad to live sync. You can then link Soocial and Google Contacts to keep a backup. You can then pop along to http://www.postbox-inc.com/extensions and download Zindus which will sync the ‘Personal Address Book’ in Postbox to Google Contacts.

Great setup, no need to do anything.

Hope this help someone in the same situation.

I am using Codeigniter for this project. I am obsessed with Codeigniter since I was introduced to it by @boxedfish. Its taken me a long time to move away from my own framework, but the move has been well worth it. There is an amazing PHP Google Maps API class which I have used in the past and I was about to get started on creating a Codeigniter library using this class when it crossed my mind to do a quick search in Google for one already built. Wise move! Google Maps API V3 Library already exists thanks to the good people at in-the-attic.co.uk.

Adding an overview map with a number of markers was one of the easiest implementations of Google maps I have ever done… however I got a little stuck when it came to the route information pages where I wanted to show the route points using polylines. A simple enough task!

I fired up the documentation (which is part of the original php class not the library by in-the-attic.co.uk)

$this->gmap->addPolylineByCoordsArray($poly_array,false,'#FF0000', '6', '0.5');

This should have done the trick. I simply get all the coordinates of my route, put them in an array and bing, bang bosh! I tried everything under the sun to get this to work but I could not get the polylines to display on the map, every time I tried to load the page the map would not load. I knew I was getting the information in the array but something was not right. I made a cry of help to twitter but nothing came back… I did what every good developer should do, I went away and worked on something else! Then it hit me, why not just open up the class file and look at the function that processes the $poly_array and see what format it should be in. It was then I realised that I was assuming that everyone called latitude ‘lat’ and longitude ‘lng’. In fact it was expecting ‘long’!

So for anyone else out there was is having problems, the correct array format for addPolylineByCoordsArray is:

$poly_array[] = array('lat' => $my_lat, 'long' => $my_lng);

I had an absolutely amazing time in New York for my 30th birthday.

Had am awesome brunch. Walked round Central Park to take some pics with my new SLR Fiona got me. Went up Empire State building. Had many beers with Simon whilst girls went shopping. Went to Toys r us in Times Square. Now getting ready for a nice birthday tea. All whilst visiting New York in the middle of a snow storm! 30th Birthday… DONE!