RSS feed now available !

RSS feed has now been created.

This is generated via php pulling the blog entries off the database in real time. I should really look at caching this. Maybe a project for another time. RSS feed is added to the header so should get picked up automatically by your rss reader pointing to this page.

#coding

Ever since we fitted the new kitchen I had planned to fit a touch screen that would run a software remote to control lights, heating, etc. Over a year ago I picked up a Acer Iconia W500 tablet from ebay. This has been upgraded to Windows 8.1 and runs the HouseBot software remote, plus many other touch friendly apps that I think will be useful in the kitchen.

The tablet has been sitting under my desk as one of the many to-do project. The plan is to flush mount it in my boiler cupboard door. Before I could do this, I needed to get a custom bezel cut to fit around the hole, that also needs to be cut. Over Christmas I finally go... read more

Managed to get to post number 12 and no paging! Currently it only returns the top 10 rows from the database. Maybe I never expected to have over 10 posts! :)

There will now be an 'Older entries' link at the bottom of the page. This has been accomplished by returning 11 rows from the database. Row 11 does not display the article, but instead generates the 'Older entries' button passing the id in the querystring. When the page is reloaded it will only return posts equal or less than the id querystring. Give it a try!

#coding

Now that I have restyled the site for mobiles. It has made me reassess my html. I really should be using html5.

So the last few evenings I have been replacing many of my divs with the new header, nav, article, time, etc. There is a great article here - http://fortuito.us/diveintohtml5/

Don't expect anything to change. Most of the new tags are for accessibility, so that screen readers can manage the site better.

These changes do bring some backward compatibility issues with ie8. ... read more

Time for another website update. This time I looked at making some style changes to allow a different view for mobile devices.

My first step was to add the media attribute to the current stylesheet link element. With this set, the style will only be used on computer screens over 1069px. I then created an additional stylesheet called mobile.css. This stylesheet will be used on handheld devices or screens under 1069px. New and updated element below.

... read more

Looking through some old backups for applications to add to the #software page. I came across an old website I created back in 2002. This site was part of my old geocities site (remember them?), part of this site hosted my Sam Coupe programs.

This is a computer that is still very close to my heart. It’s where I got my love for programming back in 1994 when I was a teenager. The page also hosts some of my work back then. Be warned, it's quite terrible, but then I was only thirteen at the time.

The main reason for this site was to create a place where I could put all my various pieces of #software from over the years. This page is finally done.

Please go and have a look. Any feedback is welcome.

Now that I have a few varied posts, I thought it’s about time I started to look at categorising these entries. My original plan was to create a new table to store the categories in the way you would expect with a normalised database. Then it occurred to me, if it’s good enough for twitter, it should be fine for my little humble site. I’ll use these new-fangled things called hash tags.

Using php regular expression, whenever there is a word with a #hash in front it, my code will wrap a hyperlink round it. Clicking this link will then return a list of posts that contain the same ... read more

Happy new year everyone. I hope everyone has had a great break.

For a long time now, I have been planning to build an arcade cabinet, but never got round to it. This was partly due to not really having the space for it and also the amount of time to create the plans, cut the mdf, etc. However, while on eBay a few months ago I came across a seller called 'richsbartoparcades'. He sells quite a few flat pack cabinet designs. I was sold on his slim version which comes in two parts. Sounded perfect. So that was my Christmas present from the wife.

... read more

Sometimes the internet can be rather lonely. I’m a number of posts down now and I have no idea if anyone is reading this, well except for my wife checking my spellings.

With this in mind, today I have spent a few hours creating an additional comments table. With this table created, the code was surprisingly easy to do, with just an additional SELECT and INSERT statement.

So don’t be shy. Say hello from the comments section.

#coding