crazybobbles

I have marked your PID and given you an overall grade of B+ (14+31+17) and the following comments

• Good start but needs more on goals and outcomes for the project
• I might focus the project on making recommendations to redesign the site to aid promotion
• I would certainly make the emphasis more of the “Musecast as Case Study” approach we discussed
• I would like to see proof that you are using “The Perpetual Beta” approach you discuss
• Glad you are blogging - I am reading
• Your catalogue of technical influences is very broad and I remain unconvinced that you will need all of them
• Your project plan seems to be mainly a list of what a plan is - avoid this sort of boilerplating.
• The risks section is particularly standard (and therefore unhelpful)

This is certainly not a bad PID but I want to see more real progress on the project.

Jonathan

Very pleased with my initial PID grade, will definitely need to start focusing on ensuring that the site is in a state that is ready for public as soon as possible to ensure I can use the Perpetual Beta approach on the public.

Ok, hopefully the LAST blog pimping up session for a long time. It’s definitely distracting me from doing other stuff haha. Anyway, I managed to update the theme a little bit more, features now include:

• New subtitle bit at the top, had to shave the header padding a bit more to compensate the subtitle.
• Dates are now shown on the right of each post via the calender type thing. This makes more room for category and meta bits under the header
• Changed the header a bit, didnt like the rounded edge thing so I changed it to a normal heading, juiced up the size a bit too
• Used a bit more of the random text plugin, some very subtle ones though, I’m sure you can find them quite easily.

Today I managed to beef up my museboard signature to include several site profiles. I designed the signature in a way so that it looks like a tag cloud in reality its just alot of size tags and all. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that im quite sick of the old banner sig now, and I wanted to generate more people reading this blog. Seems like a waste when noone reads this blog haha.
As well as that, I managed to sign up to a few things, most of them are ones I’ve meaning to sign up for a long long time but never had time to because I’ve already signed up to loads of things already, but anyway, they include:

i’ve also previous signed up to several additional things including:

and google analytics too lazy to add an image for that

I must say, some of them are pretty useful to sign up to. Will add some more detail about each one of them in future. They’re all pretty useful

Made quite alot of updates to the blog. Some of them include:

• Managed to add some hatching effect on the top menu, slightly more web2.0 haha (i feel like i’m abusing the visual styles used in web2.0 quite alot these days)
• I really like the styles used for typo (a ruby on rails blogging software). Simple stuff like softer body text (using #666 instead of the obvious #000 or even #333) and the font being verdana helps quite alot in making the site more easier to read. I’m considering making my own skin in wordpress, it looks fun.
• I’ve applied a random text plugin which allows me to shove in the occasional random bit of text for fun, one I’m using atm is the list of words you say when you reply, it can vary from x wrote this to x said that.
• I’ve provided more contact methods to be used for contacting me, the email address will be forward to me instead of using my actual one just to make changing emails alot easier (spam and all)
• I’ve pimped up my about page , it includes a photo of me, as well as some more stuff about me
• Very subtle thing, but I’ve increased the font size of the headings on the sidebar
• Adding a bit of padding to the header thing
• Now I have a left and right class on my css, this means I can use it to float images to the left or right. Pretty useful.
• Added some extra images to jazz the site up a bit, you can see them below

You can find the above on the to do list page and the contact page
For my next blog update, I think I’ll be redesigning the theme myself, might publish it and all too!

Tonight I managed to do some power coding for Musecast, was hoping to get it ready to show Jonathan Briggs after his ecommerce lecture.

The following changes included:

Improved the tags section

The tag section now includes a view tag page where you can view the tag and see where it’s been used. This tagging system is used alot in many web2.0 applications (including this blog) and provides users with a unique way of finding articles by tags rather then by a search engine, it’s almost like GIVING you the search terms rather then making you search it yourself

As well as a view tags php, I also managed to implement a quick tag cloud kind of style for the tags page, all that’s been done is that the query used to draw the tags include the number of times they’ve been used (via the tag links table) which means you can use that as a variable for deciding the size of the font. For now, the algorithm used is number of times used x 10 and the font size will be that (in pt units). I’ll definitely need to calculate a mean average for the tags and use that to generate a few steps of sizes (rather then a big bunch of steps). This shouldn’t be hard at all but I felt like doing other stuff before I got to keying in the algorithms, as well as that I might also include the font colour as another tag cloud factor (like my blog) This one is slightly tedious but still doable

Created the song section

Amazingly enough this was probably the easiest task I did. The songs section was used to tag songs into podcasts, this is so users can find out songs used for it and perhaps make it so each page includes a bit more detail about the song (havent looked into that one yet). The good thing about the songs section was the fact that it was almost identical to the tagging system, it was simply a tag, but with song titles. Though I did consider merging them together. It’s probably better to keep them separate in case I want to add additional fields for the songs section.

Implemented a “Feeds” section

This is where I really get into the xml/rss stuff. This section involved configuring the site to include feeds from other site, all you had to do was enter a url and it will instantly generate a page that includes the items inside the feed. I used a little small app called lastRss.php which allowed me to save time in coding the rss parsing, the api system was pretty neat so it was easy to implement what I needed, though I need to look into a bit more so I can see how I can further use it.

The limit field is probably the bit where I would actually need to look into the lastrss php a bit more, I would like to make it possible for the user to simply limit the feed to a certain amount of items, hopefully that can be done quite easily (should be done via the number of tags.

Quick podcast RSS feed

Managed to quickly knock off an RSS feed for the podcast, this used the fields on the podcast to generate most of the information, I’ve already done stuff like this before so now it’s definitely come in handly, will be using the w3c rss validator to ensure that i’ve got everything I need, not only that, I will probably need to use the podcasting standard too to ensure that it’s a valid podcast feed.

Another thing I will look into is getting feedburner to parse the feed, this tool will prove very useful for my client as he will be able to view all the subscribers to the feed. This tool has been used on most of the big sites such as Neowin which was where I initially found it