Pimped up a blog

Been updating Emma's blog http://theglamourcave.blogspot.com/ with her logo and some of her colour choices.

Hacking Blogger templates is reasonably amusing for a Sunday evening. Sorry it took so long to get around to it Emma!

24 hour tube petition re-opened

Reinstated Corin's petition on 24hourlondon.co.uk

"I petition the Mayor of London and the London Assembly to urgently reconsider opening the Tube on a 24-hour basis."

Now it is on a separate page. 24hourlondon now has twice the number of webpages ...

... apart from the iPhone API and the database management pages. :-)

Added a blog to Mercy Rescue Trust

A blog about a blog. Hmm.

Using Blogger for custom domains we've now integrated a blog into the Mercy Rescue Trust website. It is a gallery area to pass on stories based mainly on photographs.

A really useful tool for this was the Web Developer add-on for Firefox. By viewing the final rendered page with the mix of Blogger's stylesheets, the Blog template stylesheet and the Mercy Rescue Trust's stylesheet you can edit them in the browser to see which bit moves which. Then it is easy to copy the changes into the correct place. Very nifty.

24HourLondon launched

iPhone App with web-based API developed to deliver venues to an iPhone to those wanting to keep partying until the early hours of the morning in London.

Used JSON to transfer the information from the web to the App. The code is optimized for the expected thousands of simultaneous users. ;-)

http://24hourlondon.co.uk/

http://itunes.apple.com/uk/app/24hourlondon/id378065109

Putting images in image tags (rather than in the background of the CSS) allowed them to be found easily by Facebook when pasting the link.

Updating Mercy Rescue Trust's website

Updating the charity's website at http://www.mercyrescue.co.uk/

The new layout includes colours from a cotton shawl (a Kikoy) from the region. Added links to the Just Giving page for Mercy Rescue Trust.

Developing an iPhone App

Top Secret development of an iPhone App soon to be launched! More details when it is finalised.

I'm doing the web-server database for the application which will serve the information based on geolocation to the app using JSON.

Text finalised on Photo Archive

The text on the homepage and the about-us for the photo archive has now been updated.

Bit of a fiddle to sort out the style sheets to make all the hyperlinks look consistent.

Sorting cars by year and registration with MySQL

Just published the updates to tjlobb.com

The sort order on the car listing page was tricky.

http://tjlobb.com/stocklist.php

The cars needed to be listed by type and within type by year, then registration and then price. The trick is that the registration is a mixture of letters and numbers (e.g. W, X, 05, 51) and simple MySQL "order desc" doesn't work.

Used the following nifty trick which might be useful if anyone else is doing a car sales webpage. Set up three fields regyear (int), regcode (varchar length 2) and price (float). Remembering to trim whitespace off regcode in case someone mistakingly enters some. Then MySQL does all the sorting.

SELECT ... ORDER BY regyear DESC, LENGTH(regcode) DESC, regcode DESC, price DESC

The LENGTH(regcode) ensures that 51 is higher in the list than 01 and both are higher than any letters.

Photo archive now linked to Cornwall Museums website

Photo archive now linked to from the Cornwall Museums website.

photos.grampound.org.uk

After a little fiddling about with the ISP that manages grampound.org.uk the digital photo archive of the Heritage Centre in Grampound has now gone live.

http://photos.grampound.org.uk/

Sending excel file to browser

Polished up the management screens and added an export facility (to Excel) for the gallery data. This is how to send an excel file to the browser.

<?php
header("Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel"); 
header("Content-Disposition: attachment;
        filename=photoarchive.xls"); 
header("Pragma: no-cache"); 
header("Expires: 0"); 
// then send tab-delimited rows of your data
?>

Tag cloud formula

Modified the tag cloud for photo categories using a neat formula adapted from that found at http://r2soft.blogspot.com/2007/12/how-to-create-tag-cloud-with-formula.html

Choose a $lower_threshold then select tag counts having count of $lower_threshold or more. Find the highest tag count and define largest and smallest font size.

$cloudnumber=round(( (($this_tag_count-$lower_threshold) *
             ($largest_font_size-$smallest_font_size)) /
             ($most_popular_tag_count-$lower_threshold) )
             + $smallest_font_size);
if ($cloudnumber<0) { $cloudnumber=0; }

I put the clouds into 6 discrete buckets defined by CSS - ('cloud'.$cloudnumber) cloud0, cloud1, cloud2 etc. then modify the characteristics of the buckets. Could make it a more continuous variation in font size using a range of 75% to 300% which seems popular but I like the look of the fixed buckets generated by the $cloudnumber.

Altering the $lower_threshold will help to limit the number of tags on the photographs screen. Probably, in due course, add a 'more' link which will go to an alternative screen where the $lower_threshold is set to 1.

Grampound with Creed Photo Archive

Need to sort out the domain to publish and it is launched.

This has been a challenging project to design an 'easy-to-use' photo archive that is database driven, managed by several individuals with various levels of IT skills, and have a mirror version running from a PC that does not have internet access.

Many thanks to XAMPP, Mootools, Highslide JS and freecsstemplates.org.