Ben's Life Log

I first found out about Ben's project through kk.org which came through my Google Reader recommended items. I was instantly intrigued. Watch the video for a full explanation of the project, but it basically started out when Ben wondered how much time a day he was spending washing his housemate's dishes. It then expanded into tracking sleeping times, when he was eating, how much time he spent online. What came out of this, were some awesome, awesome infographics. You can see all the data and infographics on his site.

I've decided that I want to do something similar, but why stop there? Why not add a photo every day? Track my daily spending? There's a wealth of information to be gleaned from our daily activities.

I think the articles sums it up best when it says:

While its true that Ben's method of data gathering is unusable by most people, the type of questions he's asking and the conviction that these questions are answerable are a preview of the coming age of self-quantification.

Over the next few weeks I'm intending on building a system to start gathering data. It should be in place by the 17th March - my 21st birthday. After that, it's time to start thinking about cool ways to visualise the data

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The entire thing was recorded - I managed to ramble on for 50 minutes or so. If you want to, you can see the video embedded below or on Jeremy's blip.tv page.

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However! This semester at university is really quite interesting. I'm part of a team which is acting as a small web development company - managing everything from the client to the server the website will run on. I'm learning a lot, and am finding being able to call upon my experiences at Versatilia very useful when we get a bit stuck. While this is quite interesting the most important bit is that I'm keeping a sane sleeping pattern.

This makes a huge difference to me. Instead of just filling my time up with games and forums, I'm getting into a routine of eating breakfast (I never used to do it - it helps a lot), keeping up with tech news and actually reading the books I've had sat on my shelf for 6 months. It's also allowed me to get my development environment set up properly again and start doing some paid work. While I'm looking forward to being able to code my own little projects again, it is nice to be able to have something to show for a few hours of work a day. In my case it's a decreasing overdraft, but once it hits zero it's all additional cash

This blog started out strong, then started to wane. I'm inspired though. Elliot Haugin's redesign and commitment to writing is enough to get me trying to post semi-regularly again.

So yeah, I'm getting back on the blogging horse.

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Sunset over the sea

In my usual fashion, I decided I'd learn something and demo it the same day - this time I decided to take a look at Adobe Air. Inkeeping with my usual barcamp sessions, I decided to use jQuery to build my app - a twitter client. I only had 20 minutes to explain it, and I intended to re-build it live, so it was only basic. It would show friend's updates and post your own updates - nothing else. More on this later, but first, back to the beginning.

I got to Blackpool at around 6:30pm, and wandered up the promenade to the B+B that I was booked into. It also reminded me why I love going to places that are on the coast.

I checked into the B+B - which cost me £12 a night - and headed off to Funny Girls, the Friday night entertainment. Everyone was meeting at 8 and I got there about half past, so I went straight in. Unfortunately, there was no-one else there. I wandered round, got myself a drink and kept an eye on twitter. Eventually I spotted Jason, who looked just as lost as I felt. We had a chat and stayed there for a few hours before heading to meet the others, who had decided not to come in as they were running very late.

We met Gem, Liam, Phil, Cristian and Dave in the Flying handbag, but soon moved onto O'Neills as it was quieter. I'd never met anyone before, but it was pretty easy to get involved. Of course, as soon as we'd started chatting the live act in O'Neills started - but he wasn't too loud and was singing Irish Folk songs, so I'll let it slide. We called it a night shortly after midnight ready for BCBlackpool the following day.

In the morning, I met Dave for some breakfast then we wandered down to the venue. Venues for Barcamps are always pretty good, but this was something else. Three huge rooms, PA system in the main room and collapsible (yet still soundproof!) walls. There were also blue fairy lights everywhere, which people seemed to like.

I started off the day with Ian Pouncey's crowdsourced review of the W3C redesign. It was quite interesting hearing people critique the website of the guys who are supposed to be internet technology pioneers. I think my favourite bit was when someone spotted the use of the class "h4" on a h3 tag on the homepage.
Next up was Jordan Hatch's talk on Subversion. It was a nice introduction to SVN, and had I seen it about 18 months ago it would have saved me loads of time.

There were some other sessions in the morning, but I was absorbed in the code that I needed to write for my session, so I didn't make it to any others

Lunch next! As only around half of the people that signed up actually turned up, there was plenty to go round. Chips, sausage rolls, the usual buffet food. The bar was also open, and people had a pint or two with lunch.

After lunch, I did a bit more work on my session then presented it. Of course, as soon as I started the twitter API died, and I couldn't actually rebuild the app as I wanted to do. It turned into a Q&A session about the code, and we did get a little demo at the end of how it worked. There were only 5-10 people there, but 3 of them all said to me that the session either made them want to try jQuery, or helped them get their head round how to use it. Success!

And finally, "How to improve Barcamp Blackpool" with Gemma in the main room. Pretty much everyone was in there, and there were some good ideas thrown out there, including leaving time between sessions for people that need to move room, and for sessions that overrun a little. Someone also suggested having some longer sessions, as 20 minutes just wasn't long enough for the really interactive sessions.

Once the day had been wrapped up, we went on a mission for some proper Blackpool fish+chips. I ended up sat with Tim, Jason and Ian. While we were chatting, I noticed that Jason was wearing a CTIGroup t-shirt. I knew that I'd seen the company before, but really couldn't place it. Eventually it clicked, I'd done some work on their website when I was at Versatilia over the summer. Small world

If there's one thing out of the entire weekend that made it worth it, it was the giant disco ball on the promenade that we ran into on the walk home. It was mesmerising. It was however, also very disorientating - it was impossible to walk in a straight line. I'd love to see a cat or a dog chasing the lights

Once we were back, the drinking began! Again, only half of the people turned up, so the drinks budget was very generous indeed. We also had a stage show from Paul Sylvester, magician extrordinaire. In short, he was amazing. If I'm ever throwing a party, I'm having him there.

After a few more drinks and some socialising, it was time to leave the venue. Tim, Jason, Martin, Tom and some others were heading into town, and invited us to join them. However, as soon as we left the venue everyone disappeared and I ended up walking back to the B+B with Kian and Cat. You know what it's like, you intend to drop off your bags and head back out, but as soon as you see the bed you're out like a light.

And there we have it, Barcamp Blackpool. It was only a one day event, which will hopefully be coming back again next year as a two day event. Cracking job Gem, and her army of little helpers. Especially to Alistair who was running the interwebs, which stayed fast and responsive all day! I can't wait til next years

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The basic example was that if you're running a movie review blog, categories for genre and tags for actors/actresses may work, it would be nicer to have a taxonomy of actors and a taxonomy of genres to categorise them by. Fortunately, it's very simple to add them:

add_action( 'init', 'create_my_taxonomies', 0 );
function create_my_taxonomies() {
	register_taxonomy( 'genre', 'post', array( 'hierarchical' => false, 'label' => 'Genre', 'query_var' => true, 'rewrite' => true ) );
	register_taxonomy( 'actors', 'post', array( 'hierarchical' => false, 'label' => 'Actors', 'query_var' => true, 'rewrite' => true ) );
}

Placing that code in your functions.php file would add two new boxes to your post page in WP2.8+ that lets you add tags within your custom taxonomy. For more information, check out Justin Tadlock's post on Custom Taxonomies

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Unfortunately I had to travel from Leeds and back again each day (if anyone wants to put me up in a hotel next time I go to a conference, please feel free!) - so I missed Kevlin Henney's keynote on "The Uncertainty Principle". Looking through the comments on joind.in it looks as though I missed a light hearted yet thought provoking session.

I managed to sneak in just before the start of the talks, and decided to attend Lorna's talk on "Passing the Joel test in PHP". SPL looked quite interesting, but I took a look at it online before the conference and it looked like something I wouldn't ever need to use. I'm glad I chose Lorna's talk. It was well planned, well presented, and set the bar for the rest of the conference (coincidentally, I believe Lorna's was the best talk of the conference). The Joel Test is a list of twelve criteria used to gauge the quality of a development team. The list was originally written with desktop application developers in mind, but Lorna easily took it and showed how it can apply to web projects too. While explaining how the criteria could be used with web developers, she also shared her experiences while trying to meet the criteria, and what she found to be the best practices.

Rowan Merewood followed Lorna with his talk "Tools and Talent". He started by telling us about:

A documentary about a group
who found a start-up company
form a successful team
and successfully use new tools
to solve problems no-one knew they had

That could be any old company that has a new product they want to build, but this team was special, very special indeed. They were the Ghostbusters They had the ideas man - Raymond Stantz, the salesman - Peter Venkman and the techie - Egon Spengler. There were two more roles that Winston and Gozer filled, but I can't remember them right now.

After Rowan's talk, we had a break for lunch. I was expecting sandwiches and a cup of tea, and I was pleasantly surprised. They served a selection of dishes, I personally went for the duck which was amazing.

After the break, I attended Thomas Weinert's talk on "Optimising Your Front End Performance". Unfortunately, I'd say that this was the talk I was most disappointed with. Thomas had some interesting points, but the level of the presentation was slightly above my level of understanding. Rob Allen was giving a talk on "Getting a website out of the door" at the same time, which recieved some great reviews. I wish I'd have attended that one

Derick Rethans, the author of XDebug, was up next. He showed us how useful XDebug is when profiling and debugging applications [slides]. It's something that I don't use yet, but I'll definitely be installing it and utilizing it's features in my next project.

I'm quite involved with Codeigniter, but I'm always on the lookout for new frameworks to try out. Steve Richardson gave an Introdution to Yii, using the tried and tested "Write a blog in 30 minutes" example. There was a log of copying and pasting to make sure the demo was finished in time, but it still hooked me in and I'll be checking out Yii in future. The only other point I could make about this talk was that it received some negative feedback about the fact that he couldn't answer some questions that were posed. Steve's just a guy who found a framework that he likes, and he put in the effort to show it to us - fair play to him!

Scott MacVicar (aided/heckled by Sara Golemon) rounded off the day with a talk on how to get involved with the PHP project. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get involved with the testing of the language, and very surpised at how small the PHP project team was (only 30 or so core, if I remember correctly ). Again, this presentation inspired me, and I think I'll be getting involved in the next testfest I can find.

Teatime next! We had chicken curry or chilli to choose from. I went for the chicken, and it was pretty good. I think I was spoilt at lunch with the duck, otherwise I'd be saying it was great too. Sun sponsored the bar afterwards (rather generously! It took around 150 of us us 6 hours to drink it dry), and I spent the time meeting new people and even managed to get into a jQuery/mootools holy war

I got the last train home (23:40)/first train (07:00) back, both of which were rail replacement buses. Sharing a total of 3 and a half hours on a bus (for a journey that usually takes 1h20m) with drunken people (in both directions). I can't say that either journey was much fun, considering that I had only managed to get 2 hours of sleep.

The sunday sessions were at the Museum of Science and Industry. I managed to catch Ben Scholzen's talk on "Tokens and Lexemes". It's a pretty interesting topic, even though I couldn't see a practical use for it at the time. I've since found a very, very useful application.

Juliette Reinders Folmer was talking about UTF-8 in the second talk of the day. There were some things that I made a note of to make life easier when starting new projects, but there was nothing that new to me.

I took a break after Juliette to run through my presentation while Rick Ogden gave an Introduction to OOP. Unfortunately, I overran and missed most of Sara's talk, "PHP5.3: Hot or Not?" It's a shame, as it's the talk I was looking forward to the most. I did get lots of ideas on how to improve my talk in future thanks to BinaryKitten.

My talk went alright. Now that it's over, I would do most of it differently. Particularly that the talk seemed very disjointed, using many different examples. Next time, I'll just use one example, and demonstrate all the functions on one page. I wish I'd have prepared more, instead of just trying to wing it as I did at UnSheffield. The bits that I'd thought about in advance and knew what I was going to say went down well. Despite all this, I received some good feedback. I know everyone is always complimentary with their feedback, so if there's anything you think I could have done better please let me know. I'll never improve otherwise

And there we have it, my weekend at PHPNW09. I loved every minute of the conference, and will definitely be attending again next year.

Around the web

Lorna's writeup
Rick's writeup
Loonyblurb's writeup

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Paul kicked the day off with his talk "Oooh, That's Clever! (Unnatural Experiments in Web Design". It was all about some not so subtle) effects online that (debateably) enhance the user's browing experience somehow.

Mike Taulty from Microsoft came to talk to us about Silverlight and Expression Blend. As I thought it would be more of a pitch than a presentation (apparantly it was) I took the opportunity to head into town and run a few errands, making sure I was back for the next talk. I made it back with plenty of time to spare, and sat chatting to Dan, Sam and Oliver.

Next came Simon's talk about developing his ultimate package. I have something similar, but not quite as in depth as the Erskine package. It was quite interesting to see how my own ideas scaled against their package, which was being used by quite a few people in a work environment.

After Simon's talk, we all had a speed networking session. I hate elevator pitches with a passion, as I'm really bad at them. It was really good fun though, and I met quite a few interesting people. I also met a few people I knew by name but had never met (even if I didn't realise until I was home and looking at business cards)

After lunch, Simon was back with his talk about Bahaus Ideology, and it's role in the future of web design. It was quite interesting, but I believe I would have been hooked if I was a "proper" designer. It showed examples of things we all do in design, and how they're inspired by principles that were built up in the 1920's.

Paul came back with "50 rookie mistakes and how to avoid them". Unfortunately there are no slides online for this presentation and I didn't write any of them down. Thankfully, I think there were only one or two that I've been guilty of in the past. 50 mistakes in 30 minutes was ambitious, but we managed to get through most of them,

After a short break, Dean Vipond gave us a session on "Totally Original I Swear!". I thought this would be a session on people stealing ideas, but it turned out to be focused on how personal touches in design can make people remember your site. Unfortunately, it seems as though more and more sites are removing these touches - the "Totally Original I Swear!" button was originally on digg, but it's since been removed.

By the time Dean had finished, it was around 4:30pm and everyone was getting quite tired. I wondered how Brendan from MagneticNorth would present to keep people's attention focused on him. He didn't disappoint. He spoke about some of the projects he's worked on, and how they went from being boring to being something that really engaged with the user. Unfortunately, all I can remember is the laughs Brendan receieved for not being afread to use expletives in his talk.

After Brendan, the conference was over and it was time to head to the pub. We went to Revolution, where I drank far too much, aquired a new love for Captain Club and got talking to people. All the speakers sat talking to all the attendees, and I had quite a good chat with Simon. I also chatted to Brendan for a while about how he got to where he is now (He worked in Nelson for a while!). I can't forget everyone else I talked to, though. I had a nice chat with Joe and Sam, and some fellas (who's name I can't remember, I apologise) about how Facebook handle privacy and why it doesn't really work.

I really enjoyed the day, and will hopefully be getting to the FOWA tour when it's next in Leeds. I met loads of interesting people, made a few new business contacts and learnt a bit more about design. Well worth the time

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Then it really began to sink in. I've presented one session to date (if we don't count the trainwreck that I gave to three people at Leeds Barcamp on the sunday) - and I'm there on a page alongside a host of seasoned speakers. I started to wonder what I was getting myself into, and feeling a bit nervous.

Fortunately, I've had a few ideas about what I can say and some (hopefully) clever ideas to show people just what jQuery can do. I still only have about half a session of content, so if you're headed to #phpnw09 and there's something you'd like to see, let me know. Alternatively, if you're not going but still have an idea that I could use, it would be much appreciated

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I'll admit right now, I'm not a marketer. I don't do SEO. However, I am someone who likes to try things before writing them off - so off to #thinkvisibility I went.

The Good

I came away knowing more about the internet than I did when I arrived. For me, that justifies the cost of the ticket.

I attended five presentations throughout the day, all of which were an hour long. I missed Judith Lewis unfortunately, as I had to take a session out and deal with some work that couldn't be put off. I followed her session on Twitter, and it looked very interesting. I'm looking forward to seeing the slides - although I won't get the experience of sitting in the room and actually watching her present.

Zoe Piper

The talk of the day for me, was by Zoe Piper's talk on How To Win At The Content Network. She was up against Rob Manuel, of b3ta fame - but there was still quite a decent turnout. I wasn't sure which session I'd attend, but I'm glad I chose Zoe's.

There were lots of animals with big eyes and cats in hats interspersed with valuable content. She covered the different locations that your ads may appear, and which places have better conversion rates. I was surprised to find out that parked domains actually have a decent conversion rate as I usually just click away without reading what they have to say.

Zoe also covered the three campaign options available in adwords, and when each should be used. I also learnt that you can excluse sites that are underperforming from your campaigns, something which could be very useful to me in future.

The session lasted about half an hour, with time for questions at the end. Unfortunately, no-one had any questions to ask. I don't know enough about the area to contribute, but it seemed as though the session had covered everything everyone wanted to know.

Joost de Valk

Joost was the first session of the day, which unfortunately meant I missed the first 15 minutes of his talk. However, it looks as though I got there just in time based on his slides. Joost's presentation was the only talk that I really engaged with. He was a little worried that some of the slides were a bit too technical (not that they wouldn't understand, but that they wouldn't be relevant) for some of the audience. Personally, I loved hearing about how to optimise websites and improve load speeds by using CDN's and caching.

Joost then went on to talk about how analytics should be at the forefront of your website growth plan. Analytics are nice to look at, but are useless without goals. Set yourself attainable goals - be that a certain number of commenters, RSS subscribers or content downloads. All of which can be tracked using Google Analytics with some configuration.

He then went on to briefly talk about using social media to promote your content. There's been a lot of discussion about using url shortners, and link rot on the web recently. Joost believes that running your URL shortner isn't only a good precaution against link rot, but it also makes you one of the cool kids. He also talked about using social media buttons on posts (infact, he developed a plugin to do it) and his experiences with it. While buttons like Delicious and Twitter help, digg buttons don't. If someone unknown on digg submits your post, it'll never make front page. If you want that kind of exposure, get some well known friends to submit and blog about it.

The Bad

Food, by sk8geek

We've had the good, so now it's time for the bad. To start with,the venue was almost impossible to find (and I live in Leeds!). I arrived in Clarence Dock (just the other side of the canal) at about 9:50, and didn't make it into the first talk until 10:15. A few of the people I'd spoken to gave up searching and just got a taxi there.

I was right at the back of the food queue, and there was almost nothing left when I got there. There were a few cheese sandwiches which were alright, but the egg and tuna (not together!) sandwiches didn't look too appealing. Fortunately, there was a steady stream of tea and coffee available all day which helped. Unfortunately, the tea was cold until about midday so I avoided it until then.

The Ugly (That'd be me)

This was the first conference I've been to, and had to pay for. No doubt that's influenced my opinion of the day. Don't get me wrong, it definitely wasn't a bad conference. It's a hell of a lot better than I know I could do, and fair play to Dom and his team of helpers. The day went off without a hitch technically, and the speakers all knew what they were on about.

However, I attend these events for the social aspect as much as the talks. I know that it's all down to me, but I felt a little out of my depth with all of the marketing professionals who's job it is to sell all day long being there. They were all really confident and knowledgeable about their area of expertise, whereas I knew nothing. This made it difficult to approach someone and strike up a conversation as we didn't have much in common - as opposed to the crowds at hackdays and barcamps.

I thought this would be alleviated a little after a few beers at the afterparty. We had 10% off with our Think Visibility passes, so I thought it'd be a good night and I'd meet lots of people. Unfortunately, half a pint of Magners was £3.15, even with 10% off. There was nothing on tap, and I didn't even want to ask how much a whisky was. This led to me leaving at about 8pm after a nice chat with Paul Robinson about MVC frameworks, and hearing about some of the stories he had from his years in the industry (including being forced to spend £1.2 million on a project that could have been done for £50,000)

If I could make one suggestion for the next Think Visibility conference, it would be to choose a better afterparty venue (Mr Foleys maybe? ). Having it in the same place as a lot of people were staying meant that a lot of people disappeared for a while at the beginning of the afterparty. As the prices were pretty extortionate, a lot of people left early, completely missing those who went to their room for an hour.

Congrats

I'd like to finish off by congratulating Dom on his second conference. He had a great team of helpers in Heather, Lorna, Carolyn, Caius, Leeky, Jonny and Sean. Plus of course, Dr. Tim. I'm looking forward to seeing what else Hodgetastic put together in future.

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However, I'm too lazy to sort through itunes and make a list of everything that I need to dig out. This is where iTunes' XML export and PHP came in handy. First, I exported my library to XML by going to File->Library->Export Library, then copied it to my server for processing.

I wrote a little script that converts the XML into a nice collection of objects. There's one iTunesLibrary object, and that contains lots of track objects.

The iTunesLibrary has three methods:

function getTracks(){ return $this->_tracks; }
function addTrack($__t){ $this->_tracks[] = $__t;}
function removeTrack($__k){ unset($this->_tracks[$__k]); }

They're all quite self explanatory, but here's a usage example anyway. It will remove all tracks with the word "dark" in the title from the library object

$library = new iTunesLibrary("Library.xml");
foreach($library->getTracks() as $k => $track){
	if (stristr("dark", $track->Name)){
		$library->removeTrack($k);
	}
}

If you have any more uses for the library, let me know in the comments You can also grab a copy of the class from github, where I've enclosed the script I wrote for generating a list of mp3's that I needed to re-rip as example.php

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