Things have to change,  and a quick google has revealed that it is up to me to make those changes.  So..

1. Sort my sleep pattern - This involves getting up at the same time everyday regardless of how my sleep was or what time I went to bed.  7am every morning, on the dot (ish).  Two days in, I won’t lie, I am knackered… but who said it was going to be easy.
2. Try and wind down earlier in the evening, i.e. stop working at around 7pm.  Hmm… small steps methinks.

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See for yourself:

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A about a year or so ago, we purchased a copy of ActiveCollab to use as our main tool for project management and client liaison.  A few weeks later we requested a refund for the main reason that it was far from a polished product.

From then onwards we began using Basecamp, this was OK if a little frustrating due to the lack of features and general reluctance to upgrade by the developers. (age old gripe amongst Basecamp users generally).

We decided to give AC another go,  since they were about to upgrade to version 2.  It is fair to say that this new version is a much improved system, so much so that we are shortly to close our Basecamp account and relocate all projects to AC.  (that was the first issue, no BC to AC transfer tool).  Which isn’t so bad as BC has a export to html facility.

The biggest feature was the ability to email comments into the system, something which BC does well.  Hopefully they can find a solution to it adding signatures and old comments.  (Possibly by only allowing plain text emails?)

Other features over Basecamp are:

• adding images in the message body as well as an attachment
• grouping projects by categories
• finer access controls per user
• skinnable
• since its a hosted application, extendable (through its API)
• infinite projects
• much more

Our clients are taking to the new system much more and are happy that they can now manage their projects themselves.

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For some reason,  the obvious place for support (CodeIgniter & Expression Engine Forums) are overlooked, why? I don’t know.  To help, I have setup a Google Group which will hopefully create near instant support.  I will continue answer questions but please direct them to the group.

Please feel free to join, the more members the better,  all skill levels welcome.

http://groups.google.com/group/codeigniter–expression-engine

In addition to this,  I am looking to put together a communty portal for Expression Engine and CodeIgniter developers.  Is there much of a call for this?  What would you like it to include?  Please post your thoughts and comments.

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A technical issue is that you cannot install Internet Explorer 6 on the same machines as Internet Explorer 7.  So you either have a Internet Explorer 6 machine sat in the office or you try some of the hacks available to get them to sit side by side.

One plugin I discovered recently makes testing a tad easier.  Xenocode is a Firefox plugin which downloads the browser and opens it up as if it was installed on your PC.  It only downloads the browser once making subsequent testing instant.

Using this plugin allows you to have multiple browsers open side by side making testing web designs much less of a hassle.

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A site dedicated to getting bums off car seats and walking, the site was live for a week allowing companies and individuals around the UK to add miles walked against challenges such as walking to work and walking during lunch.

Our Role

This was a collaborative project where Next big Leap carried out the technical development of the site.  The site was built in Expression Engine with Google Maps API providing a graphical way of informing users of data such as distances walked and carbon saved.

www.walkingworks.org.uk/walk-to-work-week/index.php

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• Determine the longitude and latitude of the users postcode
• Search through the database and return results ordered by the distance starting with the nearest first

Fetching users longitude and latitude from their postcode

This requires the use of a third party service. (of which there are several).  The one I chose to use is Yahoo Maps Geocoding Service.  For this you will need a Yahoo App ID.

Once you have and App ID, you can start making requests to the service.  For the sake of this tutorial we are going to use PHP,  but the server side language is irrelevant.

$request =  'http://local.yahooapis.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=YOUR_APP_ID&output=php&state=uk&street=YOUR POSTCODE';
$response = file_get_contents($request);
$responseData = unserialize($response);
foreach ($responseData as $item) {
	$longitude = $item['Result']['Longitude'];
	$latitude = $item['Result']['Latitude'];
}

The important bits are the arguments passed to the api, in this case we have asked for the returned data to arrive as serialized PHP (output=php), alternative format is XML. For state we forced the search in UK only and the street, even though this says street you can in fact pass in any “address” element, such as city, postcode etc.

Now that we have the users longitude and latitude, we need to search the database and return stores ordered by distance. To do this, all stores in the database must also have longitude and latitude values. If yours does not, you can batch query your stores against several services. e.g. www.batchgeocode.com.

Once you have a database of stores each with valid longitude and latitude values, all that is left is to query the database using the following SQL query.

SELECT id, ( 3959 * acos( cos( radians(YOUR_LATITUDE) ) * cos( radians( YOUR_DB_LAT_FIELD ) ) * cos( radians( YOUR_DB_LNG_FIELD ) - radians(YOUR_LONGITUDE) ) + sin( radians(YOUR_LATITUDE) ) * sin( radians( YOUR_DB_LAT_FIELD ) ) ) ) AS distance FROM YOUR_DB_TABLE HAVING distance < 25 ORDER BY distance ASC;

YOUR_LATITUDE and YOUR_LONGITUDE are where you enter the values returned by Yahoo, YOUR_DB_LAT_FIELD and YOUR_DB_LNG_FIELD are the fields containing the longitude and latitude values for each store and finally YOUR_DB_TABLE is the database table you are querying. “distance < 25″ tells the database to only return values that are less than 25 miles away. You can modify or omit this to return all.

That’s all there is to it, note that I have not taken care of any error catching or legal issues with storing longitude and latitude values in the database, this is something you will need to take care of. Any comments please post below.

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This was achieved using GPolyline and Epolys, an extension that adds several useful methods to GPolyline and GPolygon classes.

Plotting the route requires taking a series of longitude and latitude values and converting them into an encoded string.  This is done using a tool from Google. 
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/polylineutility.html

Once you have the Encoded Polyline and Encoded Levels for your route paste them into the folowing code:

<div id="map"></div>
 
<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=YOUR_MAP_API_KEY" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">google.load("maps", "2");</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="epoly.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
map = new google.maps.Map2(document.getElementById("map"));
poly = GPolyline.fromEncoded({
		color:'#b30b7a',
		weight:4,
		opacity:0.5,
		points:'YOUR_ENCODED_POLYLINE_STRING',
		zoomFactor:32,
		levels:'YOUR_ENCODED_LEVELS_STRING',
		numLevels:4
});
map.addOverlay(poly);
</script>

At this point you should have a map with your route.

To place a marker at a specific point along the route, we need to return an array of longitude and latitude values at a predefined distance in metres. To do this we use a method from EPoly. GetPointsAtDistance takes the required distance value in metres as an argument and returns an array of longitude and latitude values, using the first value in the array with GMarker will position the marker.

distanceToPlaceMarkerInMetres = 100;
routeDistance = poly.Distance(); // Full distance of route in metres
if(distanceToPlaceMarkerInMetres < routeDistance){ // Ensures your distance is less than the total distance of your route
     pointsAlongRoute = poly.GetPointsAtDistance(distanceToPlaceMarkerInMetres);
     marker = new GMarker(pointsAlongRoute[0]);
     map.addOverlay(marker);
     marker.openInfoWindowHtml("You are here");
     map.panTo(marker.getLatLng())
}

That should be enough to get you going, any issues or questions then post comments below.

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Off the back of the success of Dinosaur Live, the site for the Walking with Dinosaurs Live Show, we were asked to develop their new E-commerce site.  This was built using Zen Cart and Worldpay.

The store selling to UK was launched with two more stores for Europe and North America to follow shortly.

www.wwdshop.com

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Next Big Leap was recently asked to develop a flash game giving fans of Sister Act The Musical the opportunity to win tickets to the stage show. The game was developed in flash with a PHP/MySQL database.

comp.sisteractthemusical.com

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