links for 2011-02-08
09.02.2011
links for 2011-01-14
15.01.2011
links for 2011-01-07
08.01.2011
Create a Foursquare web based photo uploader
05.01.2011
Foursquare recently launched the new photos feature on their website, iPhone and Android apps. Which adds another cool features to an already great geo-location service. However so far the website doesn’t allow you to add photos, you can only do it via the iPhone or Android app.
When the photos feature launched I wanted to be able to to upload several photos across Norfolk via the EDP24 Foursquare account for people to find at places across the county. Initially I transferred the photos to my iPhone and uploaded them to the venues using that. However I found that I could not find venues that were out of range.
To overcome this issue I decided to start playing with the new API from Foursquare, which is pretty easy to use once you get your head around OAuth (I’ve never needed to use it until now). I then used the API to create a simple HTML form that I could leave on my local machine enter a Venue ID and browse for a photo to upload.
No doubt Foursquare will add this functionality soon to the website, also there are much more elegant solutions to this problem, however this was a means to an end. If I get some spare time I may create a better widget, with venue search and proper response handling.
Soaking Christmas
21.12.2010
With Christmas only a few days away, I thought I would give my friends over at Soak a shout out, as they have created a brilliant Christmas microsite. It’s great little site that allows you to share your dream Christmas and potentially win a Harrods Hamper too. The design is a wonderful 50s treatment and some of the jQuery effects on the panels below the map are perfectly executed. Well done guys.
5fps Continuous Shooting
09.12.2010
One of the most effective ways to take photos of skateboarding is the sequence shot, where you take shot after shot of the same trick rather than one still image of it. It allows the photographer to explain to the viewer more of what the trick was, sometimes one frame doesn’t do a trick justice.
Below are a few sequence shots I’ve taken over the years, more can be found on my Your Skate Scene profile.
The Beatles Digital Sales Mistake
07.12.2010
After the recent long awaited step into the digital music sales world for The Beatles, it was expected that their songs would flood the charts, however they didn’t. So what did they do wrong?
Aside from taking far too long and missing out on sales over the last seven years that the iTunes store has been running, where the only way to get the songs without buying a CD/Vinyl was to illegally download them.
The main mistake was releasing them the whole back catalogue at once.
If the releasing of the albums had been staggered to one per week, they would have concentrated sales of individuals songs/albums into each week’s chart slot. However by releasing them all at once (around 300 songs) meant that the sales would be too widely distributed across the back catalogue to have any decent impact on the charts. They also would have been able to spin the PR and any potential halo effect on CD sales over a longer period.
Also if they had decided to enter the digital world at the same time as their Rock Band game release they could have seen a decent halo effect and benefits of being able to do lots of cross promotional activity. Retailers could have even bundled iTunes vouchers with copies of the game.
PS: This blog post was inspired by reading Martin Belam’s recent blogpost about the Beatles
So after having the bright idea of creating Foursquare badges in Call of Duty Black Ops, I tweeted a pic to Dennis Crowley, who then asked me to write a blog post and he would kindly re-tweet it for me. I couldn’t possibly refuse this as such a Foursquare fan-boy.
However a few minutes after the re-tweet my server (a small rented virtual space) started throwing a few 500 errors at users trying to access the blog post. This was of course due to around 1,300 people (maybe more as the Google Analytics code wouldn’t have been called by browsers that got the 500 error) trying to all read it at the same time.
So I quickly found and installed a cache plug-in, WP Cache Blocks in this case, dropping the required code into my template.
Luckily my theme doesn’t use too many images so that wouldn’t has slowed things too much, however to be on the safe side I uploaded the images to flickr and re-linked them in the post and refreshed the cache.
I also disabled the RSS based widgets on the sidebar incase the sudden influx of traffic annoyed the RSS feed providers (although I realised afterward the cache plug-in would have cached them too).
After this I checked the error log on the server a few times and the 500 errors had disappeared, although did spot a couple of 404s for the favicon.ico file, which I never got around to creating, so I quickly knocked one up to have a nice clean error log.
Thanks Dennis Crowley for the re-tweet, should you (or anyone else) RT a post now the site is prepared. However not sure how it would react with a RT from an uber popular tweeter such as Stephen Fry, but can’t see that anytime soon.
I’m guessing most people will have at least heard of Call of Duty by now, well Black Ops give you the opportunity to create your own playercard (emblem) instead of having to pick and choose from ones created by the developers. So what did I decide to create, the Foursquare Super Mayor badge of course, below I’ll show you how.
