Chris Riley's blog

Sales Guy vs. Web Dude

2008-07-01T21:10:00.002+01:00

Techcrunch led me to this genius video - it is about 10 minutes long, but please, especially if you're a web developer, take the time to watch it - I was laughing out loud a bit too much! (You will need sound.)

Save yourself £100!

2008-06-12T19:53:00.005+01:00

Chris 1 - 0 Insurance Company

I've just phoned up to renew our home insurance, but instead of just accepting the yearly increase I said I wasn't happy, and consequently I've got £102 knocked off the premium for the year, and we'll end up paying £5 less a month this year than we were last year!! Get in - the moral of the story, challenge the price, you never know what they might say.

Update on the Logitech Harmony 555 universal remote control

2008-06-05T08:05:00.003+01:00

Just a quick update on the Logitech Harmony 555 universal remote control review I wrote back in February 2008. We had to replace the batteries yesterday, so if our usage is fairly typical that means you get 4 months out of your 4 AAA batteries.

Google Gadgets Galore

2008-06-03T18:51:00.001+01:00

If you think the alliteration in the title of this post is great, wait until you've read the content! Recently I've got into Google Gadgets, those little useful things you can put on your iGoogle homepage, use in Google Pages and Google Sites, add to Google Desktop, and that you can embed into any website using their syndication tool.

As I have two websites that could become very useful / fun Google Gadgets I set about writing them. The first was the Recipe Binder Google Gadget. This lets you search for recipes, explore recipes, and see the most recent and top rated recipes, and having this on the iGoogle homepage is really useful. I've embedded it below so that you can see how it looks and works. On this one all links go to www.recipebinder.co.uk, but on the iGoogle version you can change the setting to link to http://apps.facebook.com/recipebinder/ if you use that version.

Add the Recipe Binder Google Gadget to iGoogle now!
Add the Recipe Binder Google Gadget to your web page now!

The second gadget is for Judge A Book By Its Cover - the great website no one visits! Hopefully this gadget is a more appropriate use of the main concept behind the website, turning JABBIC into more of a quick game on iGoogle than a destination for people. Again I've embedded it below so you can have a play.

Add the Judge A Book By Its Cover Google Gadget to iGoogle now!
Add the Judge A Book By Its Cover Google Gadget to your web page now!

Writing a Google Gadget is fairly straight forward, as long as you have a good grasp of HTML and JavaScript. The CSS can be a bit temperamental, but you'll get there. The Google Gadget documentation is actually very good compared to some I've seen, so just get stuck in! I hope you like my gadgets, all questions and comments welcome.

Photos and Videos

2008-05-27T22:02:00.003+01:00

If you've not been to my site for a while you won't have noticed that the links to photos and videos no longer point to the pages on my website that used their API's, instead to make things easier they go direct to either Flickr or Vimeo.

Why? Well, for one it means I don't have to maintain these pages. But more importantly I'm going to start making more use of the privacy features of both Flickr and Vimeo. This will mean some photos, and the majority of videos, will only be visible to my contacts on both Flickr and Vimeo. Whilst the Daily Mail / Express would like you to think this is because of “the danger of paedophiles”, it isn't.

The main reason is planning, at some point in the future I'm quite sure Charlotte won't want all of her baby photos and videos to be visible by all, so if I put the relevant privacy controls in place now, I won't have to go through thousands of photos and videos later.

Secondly, particularly in the case of videos, I upload them primairly for backup, secondly for sharing. Most of the videos are only of things friends and family would want to watch, so only letting my contacts view them makes sense. No reason putting them out there when only a few people are actually interested in them.

The same will be true of the photos - whilst I'll leave more of those public than private for now, expect further uploads to start to be restricted, with only the best pictures remaining public. On the flip side for photos not directly related to Charlotte I'll probably leave them fully public more often than not.

So, if you want to keep up to date on our photos and videos you'll need to make sure you're one of my contacts on Flickr and Vimeo; signing up for either site is quick and easy, and once you're signed up just email me your username and I'll add you as a contact.

As always any problems or thoughts leave me a message. (P.S. Comment moderation is back on due to more WOW spam.)

How many 5 year olds could you take in a fight?

2008-05-22T07:46:00.003+01:00

16
[via plasticbag.org]

Brains vs Snap = ad genius

2008-05-13T21:40:00.002+01:00

Just seen this advert during the F Word. It has Brains from Thunderbirds in it, and it is only enhanced further by using Snap's classic Rhythm is a Dancer. One of the best ads I've seen for a while.

Estelle - American Boy - what she says before Kanye's rap

2008-05-09T13:10:00.002+01:00

If you've ever wondered what Estelle says right before Kanye West's rap, like I have, you'll be pleased to know I think I've found it.

According to the Internet, it is “wagwan blud”.

Now to me, who isn't very street, and most of the population, who I am also assuming aren't very street, this doesn't make much sense. However Urban Dictionary steps into the breech to help us out.

wagwan is apparently short for “What's going on?”
blud is short for (in this context) mate.

So, in summary, what she is actually saying to Kanye West is “What's going on mate?” Makes perfect sense now!

Lizard air conditioning

2008-04-30T20:29:00.002+01:00

I'm not sure how my mind works, but it does produce some cracking ideas. Let me guide you though this one.

Dave has had a couple of issues at work today, he's not been able to test because a test server has been switched off to minimise overheating of the production servers, and this is due to two air conditioning units failing. And that got me thinking, us humans would make matters worse if we were in the room, as we give off heat, because we are warm blooded. But what if you put cold blooded people in a hot room - they'd absorb the heat!

LIZARD AIR CONDITIONING!

Genius I know. It needs a little more thought, but here is the major unique selling point, it is environmentally friendly, and carbon negative*, just what THE WORLD has been waiting for. Open your minds, and embrace the future of lizards!

* I can't prove this.

4 things

2008-04-18T20:34:00.004+01:00

1. War on Terror, the boardgame is officially on my Christmas list!

2. The new Indian Cricket Premier league kicks off tonight apparently. I say apparently as I've formed my entire opinion on this from odd bits of news reports. That said I think it sounds like a good thing, it is about time Cricket gets dragged into the modern world and gets a fresh audience. We made a good start with the 20/20 tournaments, and India seem to have just taken it to the next level. Why the ECB won't release English players to play in the league I don't know. Surely the money, training and regular play over there will improve their game at the national level? Well that's my theory anyway (although it hasn't worked for football has it!)

3. Hooters want to open in Sheffield. Some campaigner with nothing to campaign about has decided to protest about this, going on about exploitation. Bobbins, if the women want to work there then let them. It is their choice, they can read their contract before starting work there, and if they don't like it they can quit. End of, no exploitation that I can see. And the only reason you think it is sexist is because a version for women hasn't been opened - tell you what, I'll open a bar called “Todgers”. Who's sexist now? The only thing I do object to is the proposed location, Leopold Sq is not the place for it, somewhere up West St probably is.

4. We Ski - I've only seen a bit about this game, but from what I have seen I think I want it! And if we do get a Wii Balance Board then it will just add to it.

So that is the 4 things I wanted to say, you'll probably have some comments, so go on, leave them...

Google App Engine - first impressions

2008-04-08T22:20:00.002+01:00

I saw the news of the Google App Engine this morning, and was wondering just exactly what it meant. It sounds promising, a full stack, fully scalable, incorporating Python scripting, Google's BigTable database and Google's file system.

The problem, I am an ASP / ASP.Net SQL Sever developer, and so python is completely alien to me. So, this evening I set out to give Google App Engine a go. As the 10000 signup places are gone all you can do is download the SDK - this is essentially the Google Apps Engine running on your own machine, so you don't actually need to sign up for the engine just yet. Make sure you've installed python before installing the SDK.

Once python and the SDK are installed, follow this tutorial. A couple of pointers to following this tutorial.

If you're doing this on Vista, you might get annoyed with security popups if you put your files in the Google Apps directory, so stick them somewhere else that isn't so secure, I put mine on my data drive, E:
When they say run this cmd line to start the web server, you need to open a cmd prompt, then enter dev_appserver.py and the path to your helloworld directory, so for me the final cmd looked like dev_appserver.py E:\appengine\helloworld
To stop the webserver they say to use Ctrl+C when the cmd prompt has focus, on Windows (or my laptop at least) you actually need to do Ctrl+Break
When talking about adding in static files to your application the tutorial is correct, but there is a bug in the SDK, so instead enter this in your app.yaml (see this thread)
- url: /stylesheets/main.css
static_files: stylesheets/main.css
upload: stylesheets/main.css

Other than that you should be able to follow the tutorial and see the results.

So, what do I think? Well, on the face of it it looks promising. Obviously learning python is a major barrier, as is the fact that Bigtable is not a relational database, so I need to get my head around how that works in this environment (I'm guessing the theory is to have some kind of data access layer doing joins etc.) But, the benefits are equally attractive; free, scalable, hosting, highly configurable web applications, good API access to Google user accounts and email services.

I need to play with the SDK a bit more before I commit to using it for any of my current sites, but if things go well there is no reason not to, it is far easier to get started with than Amazon's offerings have ever been, well done Google!

New coin designs

2008-04-07T20:17:00.003+01:00

I missed the news about this last week, but I've finally caught up. The Royal Mint released the new designs for UK coins and my my, they are stunning. I'm not sure what I was expecting from them, I think to be a bit shit to be honest, but these far surpass any expectations I had. The reason they're so good, well I think it is down to the fact there was an open competition and so the brilliance of Matthew Dent was able to shine through. The single best bit, all the coins form the Shield of the Royal Arms - check it out!

Dramatic Lemur

2008-04-07T20:09:00.002+01:00

Judging by the view count on You Tube (2,511,959) I'm a bit behind on this one, but just in case I'm not, check this out. You MUST have the volume on to watch this. And I'd like this to be at the start of a film by the end of the year!

Dysons are amazing

2008-03-31T20:41:00.004+01:00

I've not blogged for a while, I've not really had much to say, or the impetus to sit down and type out a blog post for a while, is this what being a dad does to you? Who knows - anyway on with the main topic.

We've been in our house for a few years now, and in all that time we've been using my Grandma's bag vacuum cleaner that we got when she moved out of her bungalow. We bought a cylinder as well at the time, but that has been rubbish. Anyway, with Charlotte now in our lives, and no doubt soon to be roaming around our floors, we thought we best get something that could actually clean them - enter the Dyson DC14 All Floors

What a machine! Not only does it look good as a beacon of functional design, but boy it can suck. As a test we vacuumed a section of carpet with the old hoover, then ran the Dyson over the same bit. The amount of crap it picked up that the old hoover had left behind was incredible, we've been living in filth! Anyway, that gave me the impetus (wow, second use of that word in one post, get me!) to go and do the rest of the carpet that very second. And so 10 minutes later I've done the living room and dining room and the Dyson is full. That is simply disgusting and staggeringly brilliant at the same time - well done Dyson. I shall look forward to dysoning every weekend from now on!

And if you clicked through to the Dyson website and saw the price (£259.99) don't worry, we bought it in Dixons Easter sale for £165.00, and you can currently get it at the time of writing for £192.00

Ha!

2008-03-10T19:38:00.000Z

http://dumpedimage.com/?image=843

Charlotte's first drawing

2008-03-01T14:31:00.001Z

Take Microsoft Paint, baby Charlotte, hold down the mouse button, place her hand on the mouse pad and then post the result on the Interwebs for all to see as her first drawing - weekend fun!

Podcasts

2008-02-26T20:00:00.001Z

As part of my New Year resolutions I decided to listen to more Podcasts. At the time I asked what were the essential podcasts to be subscribing to, and I got a few suggestions. Well, a month or so on I've now got my own subscription list I'm happy with, so I thought I'd share.

Russell Brand - Very entertaining if you like Russell Brand, highly recommended
Jonathon Ross - Entertaining, some good banter and the odd good guest.
Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's film reviews - The best podcast by far. I don't watch a lot of films, but Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo together make such amazing radio you don't need to.
Radio 4 News Quiz - Can be amusing, but it can be pretty obvious at times that they don't aim it at twenty-somethings, and you have to be able to stand Sandy Toksvig.
MoneyBox and MoneyBox Live - I'm a dad now, and I have a mortgage, pension, job, credit card, car, etc so keeping up to speed on money matters can actually be very interesting when consumed via MoneyBox. And MoneyBox Live you get as part of this podcast where listeners phone in can be both helpful and amusing. “I've got £20,000 of debt, should I take out a loan to help pay it off!” - they helpfully replied that might not be wise ;o)
Radio 1 Mini Mix - a short 5 minute mix broadcast on the radio on Friday nights available as a podcast, isn't always amazing, but sometimes you can unearth a real gem that is for keeps.
Radio 1 Dance Weekly - if you like a bit of dance music then this short podcast will help you keep down wi da kidz on the latest in dance, although it has a severe lack of music!
Best of Chris Moyles - I've put this last purely so Chris Hill didn't stop reading my blog post halfway through, but if you do like to listen to Chris Moyles in the morning then this is a good way to hear the odd bits you might have missed during the week. Can't say fairer than that!

If you're wondering I did also try out Russell Howard's podcast for a couple of weeks, but just couldn't get into it, so that got unsubscribed. And Ricky Gervais, from what I can tell you have to get that iTunes installed for his podcast, so bollocks to that.

So there you have it, a very BBC affair, but to be honest I haven't really found any other podcasts on the Internet that take my fancy. As usual comments welcome, and if you have any other podcast suggestions let me know.

Ditch the tripod with this genius idea!

2008-02-09T12:44:00.000Z

This is genius, instead of taking a tripod with you everywhere to take good pictures/video take this natty easy to make string and bolt idea instead! The simple ideas are always the best. Get the full lowdown in the video.

[via iain tait]

del.icio.us and link sharing

2008-02-06T13:30:00.000Z

I've started using del.icio.us, possibly badly timed given the whole Microsoft wanting to buy Yahoo thing, but I decided it was time I stopped being Web 1.0 when it came to my bookmarks. You see for a while now I've been finding links of interest, and either bookmarking them at work, or at home, or emailing the link to myself, or recently using Google Notebook (but I don't really like it) and then having visited the site have deleted the bookmark / email to stop cluttering up my browser / inbox. Well enough is enough, I want to keep track of these links, and share them, and have API access to them!

So, I've chosen del.icio.us to do this for me. I know there are a wealth of sites that do this, but I know of this one, I know it is used by my peers, and it has a great Firefox extension for easily bookmarking links. So if you want to see what I'm currently reading up on, checking out my recently bookmarked links is a good place to start. I've added the del.icio.us icon to my list of profiles in the top right of my blog, and in the next couple of days hope to use their JSON feed to pull in the top 5 bookmarks straight into my side nav so you can all share in the link based fun.

Link sharing
You may have also noticed those icons that have appeared under the number of comments for each blog post. (If not, try Ctrl+F5). Since I'm bookmarking sites I figured I'd make it easier for visitors to my site to bookmark my blog posts. I could have gone down the route of having loads of links to different sharing sites, but as that looks awful and is a bit overkill I've decided to limit it to just three carefully chosen ones instead.

So first off is del.icio.us, a no brainer really, I'm using them, I know a lot of other people use them, so it makes sense to have them. Secondly Facebook, because, well, it is Facebook! And thirdly StumbleUpon. I've chosen these guys for two main reasons, one the BBC use them on their news stories, and two because I seem to get quite a few referrals from them, more so than any other link sharing site, so it seems to make sense I should encourage their users.

And that's it, no more news here, go off and read someone else's blog....

Logitech Harmony 555 universal remote control review

2008-02-05T13:28:00.001Z

I've bought a Locigtech Harmony 555 universal remote control - replacing the 4 remotes I have in my setup (one for my TV, PVR, DVD player and AV receiver).

I'd been in the market for a universal remote for a while, but hadn't really bothered to research them. So, when Chris mentioned he had bought one, and Christian duly commented he had a Harmony remote as well that was all the peer reviews I needed! After a quick read of the Logitech website and some reviews on Amazon I took the plunge.

A quick point Chris raised first of all. This remote is good because it has buttons, and so unlike those big customisable LCD jobs it is easier and more tactile to use.

So how is it in use then? Well, if you've read some reviews on this already you'll know that setting it up can be tricky, and I'm afraid I didn't fair any better. It took me about 2 and a half hours before I had it working properly, but there are some specific reasons for that - namely my TV.

So, to back up a second my TV is a Samsung LE26R88BD (I reviewed it here) and my PVR is a Humax 9200T (I reviewed that here). The remote worked flawlessly with my DVD player and AV receiver, but on initial setup wanted to learn a few commands for the Humax that it didn't have in its database. These were the power toggle, direction up, direction left (I think) and select.

Tip: When you are teaching the Harmony a command you have to point the source remote at the bottom of the Harmony for it to pick up the signal, something I found out after a couple of frustrating minutes, a case of RTFM!

Those learned it carried on with the setup, and given our TV model number recognised the fact that you have to cycle through the source inputs on a Samsung, rather than just choosing one directly. To this end it asked for the inputs and in what order they were in. I turns out I got this wrong on initial setup, and so consequently when trying to setup activities (a way of having the remote turn on everything required for a particular activity, like watching TV or a DVD) it kept cycling through to the wrong input source. To resolve that I had to tinker with the settings after setup in the devices tab, but once it had the right input list it was happy.

The second issue I had with my TV was that as you cycle through the inputs, if it lingers too long on “PC” it goes into standby, and so then can't switch it to “Ext1.”, and again gets confused. To solve this, again go to the devices tab, and this time alter the input-delay setting, and make it smaller. Finally our TV takes a good 5 seconds to “warm up”, but in the meantime the remote might be sending switch input commands, and so to combat that set the startup delay (I think it is called that) to say 6000ms so that the remote knows to wait a while before sending the switch input commands.

With those tweaks in place, and after a bit of testing the remote is working well, and I'm really happy with it. It works well with the Humax. The main feature of course it that it is one button to switch on and off everything you are using for a particular activity. The other great feature is that the volume controls the right device depending on the activity, so sometimes it controls the TV, other times is controls the AV receiver. I've also setup the custom buttons with various PVR functions (such as playlist, text, picture in picture) and don't be put off by the fact there are only 4 buttons in the picture, as you can have multiple pages of buttons on the LCD bit. The only niggle, because of the delay the TV needs you have to hold the remote at the equipment for a few seconds when switching stuff on and off. However, should it miss anything the great help feature means you can solve the issue very quickly.

Most importantly it is wife friendly, once setup Dawn hasn't had many issues, and is glad to see the back of the sea of remotes we used to have! If you are in the market for a universal remote I highly recommend this one. The only thing I've not managed to achieve with it yet is altering the volume on the TV depending on the activity I choose - I might have to contact the supposedly excellent Logitech Harmony support for that one. I'll let you know if I get a solution.

Update: If I'm an average user of the remote then battery life is about 4 months.

It is too late - Charlotte is a hoodie!

2008-01-28T21:14:00.000Z

It is too late, Charlotte is destined to terrorise the neighbourhood as she has worn her first hoodie today. The downside to her reign of terror is that she looks far too cute in it. But it could be a sign of times to come, give it 15 years and who knows!

Thanks to Ant who bought us it tho, she looks really sweet in it. In other Charlotte news she is putting on weight and is probably somewhere around 7lbs now, 7wks old, growing fast! Dawn is doing fine too, so all is good here! There are loads of new pics in the gallery, so check it out!

last.fm is AWESOME

2008-01-23T20:22:00.000Z

I first blogged about last.fm back in April of 2006, and back then I was pretty taken with them, they offered a great service and are great for getting info on bands and music of all tastes. You were also able to listen to clips of tracks to get a feel for an artist.

Well today they have become the single best website on the Internet, and that is a bold statement. Now you can listen to the tracks in full, as explained here, streamed right there and then - music when you want it.

The power of this? Now when you hear a track by a band you can go and hear all of their other tracks straight away. Want to listen to a classic, go for it. No waiting for downloads, just instant gratification (and then of course you can buy the download/album if you want). Sheer music genius.

So now you all have no excuses when I tell you that The Wombats are a great band and you should listen to some of their tracks. I particularly recommend “Moving to New York” and “Let's Dance to Joy Division” as you'll have heard these on the radios.

Well done last.fm, you are truly AWESOME!

No Google Analytics API? No Problem!

2008-01-17T14:23:00.000Z

If you're like me, you probably have a blog and use Google Analytics to track visitor activity. If you've not already got one, you probably want a "Most Popular Posts" section on your blog as it's a great way for new visitors to find your best content. The only problem is that this would usually have to be hard coded, and would therefore need updating periodically after you've checked the "Top Content" report in Google Analytics, or it would require some server-side scripting and a database to track your page views and show the links dynamically.

Wouldn't it be great if you could somehow use Google Analytics to display the "Most Popular Posts" section on your blog automatically? That would be a huge time-saver for you and would make it much more useful for your visitors as it would always be up-to-date. Unfortunately, Google Analytics doesn't have an API, but here's a method that doesn't involve any server-side code or screen-scraping. All you need to do is use a few existing free services from Google and Yahoo and a bit of JavaScript.

Basic Method

Obtain the tracking data in a usable format -- We can schedule Google Analytics to email this as an XML file on a regular basis.
Make the XML file accessible online -- By emailing an attachment to Google Groups, the file is automatically given a public URL.
Work out the URL of the most recent report -- Since Google Groups provides RSS/Atom feeds for all messages, we can easily find the URL of the most recent message and therefore work out the URL of the XML report.
Prepare the data for use -- We need to manipulate the XML and massage it into a handy JSON format that we can use on our blog, which can all be done using Yahoo Pipes.
Display the links on your site -- With just a bit of client-side JavaScript, you can finally add a self-updating "Most Popular Posts" section to your blog.

There you have it! Using your own Google Analytics data, you can create a completely automated way of displaying your most popular posts to your site visitors.

If you're interested in exactly how I did this, the rest of this post expands on each step and take you through the entire process...

Setting up the Google Group

Since Google Analytics doesn't provide an API, or allow you to link directly to any exported reports, we'll use a Google Group to host the files which we'll schedule Google Analytics to email to us. When you setup your Google Group, choose the Announcement-only option. Once created, under the Group settings menu item, select Access and make sure that Anybody can view group content, Do not list this group and People have to be invited are all selected. This is so that no one else can post to the group, which would cause issues when trying to retrieve the Analytics message. Keeping the group unlisted makes it less likely for someone to stumble across your Analytics reports when searching Google Groups. Although it would be preferential to make the group private, this would prevent public access to the feeds for the group, which we'll need later.

While we could email our reports directly to the Google Groups email address, each message would then contain an "opt-out" link because it's not the email address we've got registered with Google Analytics. Given that our messages will be publicly available, we'll be using Gmail to forward the messages from the same Gmail address we use for Google Accounts so that if anyone manages to find the Google Group, they can't stop our scheduled report. Simply create a new filter, looking for any email with Analytics in the subject that has attachments and have Gmail forward the email to your Google Group. (You can choose to "skip the inbox" so you don't have automated reports cluttering up your inbox too.)

Setting up Google Analytics

In Google Analytics, under the Content section, view the Top Content report and change Show rows from 10 to 50. (You can't configure how many results to include in your report any other way; it just remembers the last setting you selected.) Now click the Email link button near the top of the page, beneath the page title. Select the Schedule tab, change the report format to XML, set the date range/schedule to Monthly (unless you have a really active blog, then you might want to keep it on Weekly) and click the Schedule button at the bottom. Just to test everything, select the Send Now tab, choose XML as the format and click the Send button.

If everything worked correctly, after a few seconds your Google Group should have a Top Content XML report in it! :o)

Yahoo Pipes

You'll need to find the feed URL for your Google Group. You can get this from the XML button at the bottom of your group homepage. Choose one of the New messages feeds, copy the URL and head on over to Yahoo Pipes...

For those that don't know, Pipes is a really powerful service provided by Yahoo that lets you fetch data from all over the web and perform various operations on it, resulting in new or altered XML feeds / JSON output being created, all done using a funky graphical interface -- not a line of programming code in sight!

A screenshot of the Pipe being used.

The Yahoo Pipe I'm using can be found here. If you're familiar with Yahoo Pipes, feel free to view the source, clone this pipe and use it as the basis for you own implementation. For those not familiar with Yahoo Pipes, here's a brief rundown of what's happening:

Grab the Google Groups XML feed and truncate it to leave us with the most recent message.
Take the message URL and modify it to give us the URL of the XML attachment (basically replaces "msg" with "attach" and appends "?part=2").
Select the report data from the XML attachment and filter out any links we don't want to include.
Finally, using the filtered links, fetch each blog post from the website to retrieve the page title for use in the link and truncate the results to return only the top five.

The result is a JSON file containing the top five most popular blog posts based on the most recent Top Content report sent from Google Analytics to the Google Group.

Displaying your "Most Popular Posts"

The final step is to take the JSON file returned by Yahoo Pipes and display the contents on you website, which can be done using some client-side JavaScript similar to this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=6vhLQfPC3BGM7_UDo_NLYQ&_render=json&_callback=topcontentCallback"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
function topcontentCallback(obj) {
    var url,title,output,i;
    i=0;
    output='<ul>';
    while (i<5 || i< obj.count) {
        url = "http://www.yoursite.com" + obj.value.items[i].Key;
        title = obj.value.items[i].loopfetchpage[0].content;
        title = title.substring(27, title.length-8);  //remove the <title> tags the pipe leaves in.
        output+= '<li><a href="' + url + '" title="' + title + '">' + title + '</a></li>';
        i++;
    }
    output += '</ul>';
    document.getElementById("popularPosts").innerHTML = output;
}
//-->
</script>

(Basically, we're making the pipe execute a JavaScript function on the web page by using a callback on the JSON URL. To learn more about JSON visit the Yahoo Developer Network's JSON overview, or the official home of JSON, JSON.org.)

Conclusion

This is a simple way of making your Google Analytics data available to use in your own web pages and applications. There are obviously some privacy issues, as your report data is available for everyone to see on Google Groups (which can easily be found by doing a quick search) but if you think that's a worthwhile trade-off for being able to have a maintenance-free top posts section, then the world is your oyster...

And you're not just restricted to displaying your most popular posts. You could also use a similar technique to display your top keywords, referring sites, geographic locations, browsers... and anything else which you can find in Google Analytics!

Have fun mashing up your Google Analytics data!

Also cross-posted on Google Blogoscoped

Time lapse film of Charlotte sleeping

2008-01-13T20:56:00.000Z

What do you do when you have a HDD camcorder with infrared recording, a tripod, a baby daughter and you're a geek? Why, make a time lapse recording of your daughter sleeping of course! This condenses a night with Charlotte into approx. 5 minutes. Enjoy!

Time lapse film of Charlotte sleeping from smuggyuk on Vimeo.

For the geeks out there wondering how I did this, firstly I've got a HDD camcorder so it can record up to 7.5 hrs in one go. So, setup on a tripod with the infrared recording on I could just leave it, switching it on and off with the remote as and when we had to take her out for feeds. Then once I'd got the video on the laptop I simply used the “Speed Up, Double” effect in Windows Movie Maker 5 times on each clip, nothing too fancy. This made the length of the whole film about 5 mins. Publish and upload to the web, job done!

Review of 2007 and New Year resolutions for 2008

2008-01-03T20:27:00.000Z

As is customary at this time of the year I've taken a quick look back over what I blogged in 2007. It is a mixed bunch, I went to Hack Day, we nearly got flooded, I developed various bits and pieces, including PhotoWall and Recipe Binder, Dawn got pregnant and had Charlotte(!), I fiddled with Ubuntu, we got a new TV, Wii and laptop, went on holiday in Morzine and Brussels, went to some gigs, redid the Website Validator, discovered Vimeo and Facebook, ditched twitter, went to my sisters wedding and ranted as I do.

So that was some of 2007, but what of 2008? I'm not really one to make New Year resolutions, but after a bit of quick discussion in the pub this lunchtime I've managed to come up with 4! So without further ado:

Listen to more podcasts - now I have a decent MP3 player and Dawn won't be traveling to work with me I can listen to more on the train. However I need some help, what are the essential podcasts I should be subscribing to?
Climb the stairs at work. Again now I don't have a pregnant wife traveling with me there is no reason I can't climb the 6 flights of stairs instead of getting the lift!
Don't become a baby bore. I had things to say before Charlotte was born, and I know people don't want to hear about her all the time (even if she is really cute)!
Learn to play the bass guitar - I'm not sure I'll keep this one, but I've put it here as a kind of good intention!

So there we have it, lets see how I do. Podcasts I should subscribe to in the comments please!