example code of how to geo code addresses

Posted on April 25th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: Uncategorized.

I've had this in my book mark for a while and thought was handy. Essentially the code shows how with a database of address how you can usea call to a google service to return a xml file which you then iterate through to extract what you need.

Geocoding Addresses with PHP/MySQL

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weekend of coding at secret london

Posted on April 25th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: Development, London gems.

I've had this post sitting in my draft posting for the past couple of months and had completely forgotten about it until recently, so I thought it best to commit some thoughts down for future prosperity..or something.

It was back in February when I noticed a call from secret london for developers to help build a website and so looking for a small project at the time to sink my teeth into, I thought I'll come down. I head to where they had a small cozy office off oxford circus to meet the small gang of 4. After chatting a bit with a slightly shy girl who I thought was called Georgia (for some bizare reason) go through the website concept. This girl turned out to be Tiffany, the creator of the facebook group! At the time with my tired mind I was unawares of this! (sorry Tiffany if you are reading this)

Anyways...walking through the site idea, I had commented how I could possibly offer a few hours of my time a week over the next few months. Obviously Tim (the main dev guy) had thought about scalability and having a fast backend from the start. It was a shame he had decided to do it in Django and some weird data engine called Solr but I was enthusiastic working with people who knew what were doing. The real kicker or as Greg (who I considered the energetic and charismatic "ideas man") came out with the punch line... they were planning to create the whole thing in a weeks time! I was a bit stunned but said I will try get back to them (but still enthusiastic to try help out). I left thinking decisively "These people were slightly mad.", my favorite type of people :)

Moving onto the following weekend with some great planning and scheduling done through gdocs, the "guerrilla style" site build was underway starting on the Friday near Farringdon. Unfortunately I could not attend from the start and joined them on the Saturday. My php skills would be slightly rubbish for this project but decided to help out as best can with the javascript side of things.

I met some fantastic peeps on the day, chatting mainly to Ruth and Andy The setup was was very fun with a large area to accommodate the gang of designers, developers, editors and content people with booze and food around. I found it amazing to see so many people spending their weekend pushing forward something they believed in and credit is due to Demetrios for keeping the atmosphere positive, making sure everyone was happy! The content people had a very arduous task of transferring as much of the information from the facebook website to the site database. There was then the 4-5 developers  nd roughly same amount of designers do the front end work.

It was a bit of a shame on my part as I had a couple of bday do's to attend on that particular weekend, I wanted to hang around a bit longer to polish off my section! After spending a few hours here and there, trying to play around with the google maps local search api, I managed to offer a small contribution in the form of a google map showing the secrets for the first version of the website. I finally left late on the sunday after the design team had did the initial load of the site on a beta domain, at that point it truly struck me how an amazing feat they had achieved with the number on the posters indicating how much data they had loaded and the functionality they managed to squeeze in!

Secret London contributors on the sunday

The experience was definitely a positive one and it made me realise how doing coding for projects like this is really good fun. I should do more of these! I had a chance to learn some new stuff that I wouldn't otherwise expose myself to and got a tasty curry and beer for my troubles! Would I do this again? Definitely.

Further links

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ultimate SEO list

Posted on April 13th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

I thought I'll start creating a SEO checklist for my personal and whoever likes to reference this, at the moment itd quite small but will add more and more over time.

General site structure

  • "keywords" meta tag - google ignores
  • h1 tag - descriptive term
  • description meta tag -
  • friendly url - that describes the page hint: should be close to H1 tag
  • Keep content as high as possible
  • Vary the media
  • Add alt tags to all picture
  • If using flash add spiderable content of what the flash content should have

Making google happy

  • Optimise for speed

More techie stuff

  • Robot.txt
  • Sitemap.xml - generate automatically
  • rel="Nofollow" - add to outbound links which you do not want the search engine to give weight or scrae through
  • When using ajax to update content, make sure we can degrade to non-javascript mode as I do not believe the spiders render the page to figure out what content will appear

Content guide

  • html site guide
  • Privacy policy

Tools

  • Googleweb master
  • http://www.pluginseo.com/
  • majesticseo.com - report on backlinks
  • ubervu.com - tracking how people respond to your website. Helps with building relationships and back linking further?

Other

  • Backlinks - get other sites to create a link to your site

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using xdebug on wamp under windows 7

Posted on April 13th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

I recently had windows 7 installed on my machine at work after it had been running like a dog for the past 6 months, previously I had Win Xp. I tried to install WAMP and xdebug but was finding that I kept on having random connection issues and breakpoints was not working, bloody annoying! At first I thought this was because I was running php 5.3 wamp but then tried to put in php 5.2 but pin point it to recent versions of Xdebug not playing very well with WAMP.

I read a couple of posts and just changed dll used to version 2.0.0 and it suddenly worked!

Also for future reference :

zend_extension_ts="C:/wamp/bin/php/php5.2.9-1/ext/php_xdebug-2.0.4-5.2.8.dll"
xdebug.remote_enable=on
xdebug.remote_handler=dbgp
xdebug.remote_host=localhost
xdebug.remote_port=9000

Got this from the netbeans wiki

UPDATE: Really useful xdebug wizard to work out which binary and instructions for your specific setup. Awesome juice!

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Large Hadron Collider stuff

Posted on April 5th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: humour, justgeek.

I've been seeing a few things about the Large hydron collider of recent time and thought I'll drop these two gems of a find links from the nytimes explaining the basics of the Hadron and also the plans to use the london circle line as the Hadron version 2

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