Friday, July 13, 2007

Google

Can anyone else get to the top position for a Google search of a single common English word? Bournemouth and Poole College are no.1 if you search* for college. I'm not completely sure how we managed that. Anyone want to hire me to do SEO?

*Actually, just Google UK, but if you go to Google.com then it should redirect you to .co.uk

Update: now we're 2 again :-(

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Time for bed now everyone

Good night people.

Websites you should use

Web development ideas

Because I code all day at work, my brain keeps trying to code when not at work. Can be annoying but here are some things (web sites) it's thought of:

  • Wedding gift list creator - I already made a basic one. Could be a good business.
  • Wiki'd Bible notes - let people add notes (public, shared with friends or personal) on verses / passages of the Bible. Would be nice to have lots of people explaining things. Could be used on other books too (eg for school projects). On a similar note, it would be cool to have 2 separate wikis side by side about Christianity in general, one side edited by atheists and the other by Christians, both with credible references and sources; e.g. The Case for Christ is a good book but it would be good to see it compared to an atheists viewpoint. (This page is interesting.)
  • Can't remember what else now.
If you're a web developer have a look at the jQuery JavaScript library. It's pretty amazing.

Still alive and well

Due to popular demand* I'm going to try to start blogging again. To start with, I'll give you a brief history lesson of the past couple of months.

On the 24th Feb Hannah and I got married! How cool is that? We're still married and exceptionally happy together. I've uploaded a few photos my Dad took here. There's a fair few more if you look either me or Hannah. Hopefully more photos to come. Thanks to everyone who came and made our day special.

We also now have our own flat over here. It's very nice and you're welcome to come and visit - just give us a call.

We're both still working at The College, Hannah as a librarian and me as a web developer. Seems to be going well but it's a shame we can't stay at home all day!

I better go now - need to sneeze.

*Well, not really demand, I just thought I'd blog a bit.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

End of DRM soon?

The Register has a good article about this. Soon, partly thanks to Apple, DRM (at least on music) should be going.

In case you don't know, DRM (Digital Rights/Restrictions Management) is what stops you from playing lots of the music you download legally on the device of your choice. It means you can't play iTunes music on a Zen and can't play music you download from your phone on your eyePod. Or car, or friends computer, etc.

Important things to note:

  • DRM makes it harder for the average consumer to do what they want with their music. It does not stop piracy - pirates can always crack DRM. In fact, even with DRM, it is still easier to download a song illegally than it is legally. The illegal song will work on any phone / computer / MP3 player.
  • There has always been lots of music downloadable (free and paid for) which does not have DRM. e.g. eMusic. Though this is only music which hasn't been signed by large record companies.
What's happened recently is the record labels are realizing that customers don't want to buy restricted products. They are also beginning to realize they'll make more profits (esp in the long run) by selling music without DRM on it.

This is all good news for us customers because it means it will be easier to buy music and easier to play music.

The bad news is that online video downloads have only just started becoming popular and they have even more DRM than music downloads.

14 days until Wedding!

So, we're still at stage 13 of How to buy a house. Hopefully we may be on step 14 on the 16th Feb. Other housey things are going OK. We're mostly just waiting for solicitors.

Wedding plans are going well but it seems like there's so much to sort out. Getting very excited now - only 10 days of work left!

Work is going well. Though since my web development skills are getting better it makes me realize like sites like this are poo. Also if I think too much at work then I sometimes dream JavaScript. I wonder if I could pull the RSS comments to this blog through XHR with some kind of AJAX stuff (probably based on jQuery - v cool).