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Did Last.fm pass data to RIAA?

Charlie Vaughan — Sat, 23 May 2009 15:41:09 +0000

There’s something of a spat developing over whether Last.fm’s parent company CBS handed over sensitive user listening data, usernames and IP address to the RIAA. TechCrunch challenges Last.fm to Deny This after Last.fm says “TechCrunch are full of shit”.

Kevin Rose’s new site WeFollow

Charlie Vaughan — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 22:36:30 +0000

Digg founder Kevin Rose last week launched his new site WeFollow.com, a user-content-driven, Twitter directory. WeFollow categorises and aggregates your Twitter account based on the three keywords you supply and your Twitter following.

Lead designer leaves Google

Charlie Vaughan — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 22:08:55 +0000

Douglas Bowman, Google’s Visual Design Lead has left the company, posting his reasons on his blog Stop Design. In his goodbye message he sites the over use of testing and data to justify every design decision saying: “that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision”.

IE8 now available for download

Charlie Vaughan — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 20:15:04 +0000

Version 8 of Windows Internet Explorer is ready for download. IE8 thankfully promises to be more standards compliant than predecessors and as a result features a “Compatibility View” button to account for sites optimised for legacy versions of the IE render engine. IE8 offers developers the opertunity to force IE8 to use the IE7 render [...]

Gigya Social Widgets

Charlie Vaughan — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:04:59 +0000

Gigya.com is a “widget sharing platform” that helps developers and publishers distribute widgets, providing an API and analytics, to help you create and publish to 70 well known social networks, blog platforms and bookmarking sites.

Are My Sites Up?

Charlie Vaughan — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 10:00:37 +0000

aremysitesup.com offers a web service that notifies you when your website becomes unavailable and then comes back up. The free package will check up to 20 sites 25 times a day, sending notifications by email or SMS. The premium $75 package will check 60 sites every 15 mins or less, with additional notification and advanced [...]

Improved WordPress performance, shared hosting and 500 errors

Charlie Vaughan — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 19:46:45 +0000

I’d previously mentioned how I’d had problems with WordPress 500 errors when attempting to install plugins. I had put this down incompatibilities between WordPress MU and some plugins, but with a few simple changes to the configuration of the PHP installation on your hosting account, you can quickly improve WordPress performance. After getting a bit bored [...]

Twitter, TwitPic and TwitterFeed

Charlie Vaughan — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:40:17 +0000

I’ve been playing with a few Twitter spin-offs this week, TwitterFeed and TwitPic. The first allows you to automatically post items on an RSS feed to your Twitter account, while TwitPic allows you to post your pictures to your Twitter account via a mobile device, email or web interface. Both of these web apps are pretty [...]

Dummies guide to image compression algorithms

Charlie Vaughan — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:06:31 +0000

In order to compress your images to best effect it helps to understand the compression technologies (algorithms), used by the popular file formats for web graphics. This helps you understand why one image will achieve better clarity or smaller file sizes, compared to another image using the same compression settings. You can then optimise your settings to suit the image.

Dummies guide to image formats

Charlie Vaughan — Sat, 03 May 2008 16:52:17 +0000

Choosing the right format depends on the task in hand, while some basic understanding of the underlying technologies will go a long way in getting the most from your image manipulation software. The four most important file formats used on the web are the GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) and the 8-bit [...]