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The trip was amazing! We ate lots of fantastic food, saw great shows, went up tall buildings, drank cocktails, went to zoos, took boat cruises, ate some more food, saw the sites, did shopping and generally stood around looking up and gaping at the tall buildings.

More photos to follow of Chicago and Boston.

Arrived 2pm, collected tickets, checked-in, walked to Strand Leon, walked to Covent Garden. Wandered in shops, champagne at the Liberty champagne bar, then tube to Haymarket Royal. Saw Breakfast At Tiffany’s – good but uncomfortable seats (you get what you pay for). Hungry, found random Italian “Prezzo” and had calzone and wine. Bed.

Sunday

Breakfast from kitchenette then walked down Mall to palace, cyclists everywhere, saw Boris. Went up arch then tube to St Paul’s. Coffee and cake at Paul, peaked in cathedral, took photos and then walked across bridge to Tate Modern. Nothing new on so carried on along river to Tower Bridge view. Tubed over to north side and walked to British Museum. Tired, had coke and cream scone. Did bits of Egypt and Greece then headed back to hotel. Got ready and headed out to Benares. Very nice! Had brilliant cocktails, tandoori chicken, meatballs/salmon, deserts, bottle of wine, coffee and petit fours. Very swanky part of town. Tubed to London bridge and met parents in the Real Greek for a drink.

Monday

Checked-out, breakfast from Starbucks, got London Eye tickets, walked to Westminster and met parents. Went on Houses of Parliament tour, very interesting! Then waked over to London Eye and saw the view. Tubed to Liberty cafe and had nice lunch with parents. Realised it was getting on so went and retrieved bags from hotel and got to Kings Cross. Boarded train back north.

View Arran Trek in a larger map

All of my various online activity is aggregated by those nice people at FriendFeed. I then use their API to pull this out and display it in a nice fashion. Currently I’m aggregating: flickr, twitter, last.fm, upcoming, dopplr, delicious and my google reader shared items. I also wanted the full content of blog posts to appear within the stream. Strangely, this doesn’t appear to be particularly easy to do. FriendFeed only caches the title of a post and none of the content. So, I let FriendFeed aggregate my blog posts but then when I come to display that entry in the stream I use the wordpress “stub” (which uniquely identifies a post) from the URL to lookup the post in my local database and display it from there. Slightly convoluted, but it works.

Of course, a day after I finished getting the stream stuff working, FriendFeed announced that they’d been acquired by Facebook. Great. I suspect that moving forward Facebook aren’t going to maintain the current feature list and API access that FriendFeed allow currently. In that regard I’ll probably look at rolling my own lifestream aggregating solution. Possibly using the SimplePie PHP RSS library and it’s very neat looking merge_items() function.

For the nice large image at the top I’m using the PHP Flickr library to grab all of the image from my Favourites set. I then cache the heck out of these images and display a randomly chosen one. I’m thinking I might add some subtle navigation to allow you to “refresh” the image to get a new one.

All comments and suggestions appreciated!

I think that making the website resemble the signs from the street is a poor design choice. Why not work with the medium you are presenting information over (the web) rather than trying to make it resemble something else? They constrain information into a tiny space, put it in a stupid font, make the background looks like all lcd-y, use excessive popups and it takes forever just to get to the basic information.

In shock news, this isn’t just a whiny post with no actual action. I present the beginnings of a “Bus Tracker API”. Think of it as a “cleaning” of the data for a fresh beginning. If we can get clean data out of the system then we can build a clean interface on top of it. My API is REST-ful and inspired by the flickr API. I have one method so far “bustracker.departures.getNext” which takes one parameter: the bus stop code. It shows you all of the incoming departures for a given bus stop. Here it is working for the stop nearest my flat. Feel free to change to bus stop code to another one by digging around the Bus Tracker website. I’ll hopefully have some other, more useful methods done soon and maybe some nifty google maps visuals…

Update: Source code now browsable at: http://trac.ollyjackson.com/bustracker/browser/trunk