Wootten's Weblog

If You Build It

Ian — Thu, 03 May 2012 09:48:12 +0000

If my years in academia have taught me anything, it’s that insight obvious to you isn’t often obvious to others. As a result, I’ve pretty much adopted a gung-ho hacker attitude towards getting my own ideas built whereby I’ll just … Continue reading →

How to Switch Your VPS in 2 Hours

Ian — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 11:31:16 +0000

Friday last week I woke up to a barrage of emails coming into my inbox. All of these were coming from notification of spam comments upon this very blog. By the time I’d woken up I’d had something like 75 … Continue reading →

Where’s my Full Stack Payment Service?

Ian — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:50:18 +0000

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll realise that there’s an uprising against paypal amongst developers. Most of this stems from the multitude of crazy requirements they put upon sellers and the locks they can put upon your account … Continue reading →

New Adventures 2012 – Self Help for Web Designers

Ian — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:38:53 +0000

Last week, like many others working on the web, I took the trip to Nottingham for New Adventures 2012. I’d seen the wonderful praise dished out for it last year and felt like I wanted to see what it was … Continue reading →

Goodbye 1 & 1

Ian — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 21:06:46 +0000

I just sent the following email to 1 & 1′s billing department. I’ve been with them for coming up to 7 years now and they were, when I first used them, the only registraar I knew about and I was … Continue reading →

Pagination in CouchDB Apps

Ian — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 23:40:41 +0000

I’ve been working on some fun little node.js / couchdb projects of late. Given the fact I don’t use either as part of my work, I’ve spent some downtime experimenting and slowly iterating my approaches as I learn best practice. … Continue reading →

Hosting an Octopress Blog on Amazon S3

Ian — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 15:11:13 +0000

Octopress is a framework for blogging based on the static site generator jekyll. In short jekyll takes markdown and turns it into blog style html ready to be served straight away with Apache whilst Octopress dresses it up nicely with … Continue reading →

Lovefilm Filmstream Plugin v0.2

Ian — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 23:10:17 +0000

Just a quick note to say I’ve updated the plugin that generates my filmstream pages. It’s become obvious that the Lovefilm API only exposes the last 10 features that you’ve rented in their “at home” list. This isn’t that great … Continue reading →

Participate, Don’t Preach

Ian — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 12:16:59 +0000

Last week, tickets went on sale for dConstruct 2011 and sold out within an impressive 7 hours. Having attended in 2010 and 2008 and judging it to be filled with the highest calibre web celebs from across the globe, I … Continue reading →

Maintaining References to Sockets with Express and Socket.io

Ian — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 13:01:26 +0000

I hit a frustrating problem when trying to use expressjs alongside socket.io recently. The solution may seem somewhat trivial, but I struggled with it for a while, until finally asking for help on the socket.io irc channel. I’m not sure … Continue reading →