Solution Perspective Media Blog - Programming

Traffic alerts via Twitter mashup with optional SMS

nospam@example.com (Jeremy Coates) — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:15:10 +0100

As a recent fan of twitter (you can follow me if you like) as a short (read text message length) form of blogging, I was quite interested to spot a blog post from Andy Davies about using twitter to mashup with traffic data feeds. I used his technique, though in a simpler format e.g. I didn't bother with the Yahoo! Pipes element, to create a traffic alerts feed. As we're in the Northwest of England, I wanted to use a traffic feed relevant to this locale. To this end, I used the Northwest UK RSS feed from the Highways Agency traffic feed list.

So let's cut to the chase, how do I do this? In a nutshell: Create a new twitter account; link that to a twitterfeed.com account (a service that turns RSS feeds into twitter posts) and an RSS feed; then follow in your normal twitter account the new twitter account just created and, if you want text alerts of the data (e.g. when you're actually travelling round the area), turn on device updates for the following of the new account (assuming you've already registered a mobile device for this purpose in your main account).

Then you get new tweets and or text alerts each time there's a new RSS entry in the source feed. Sweet

If you want to subscribe to the results for that feed simply skip all the setup above and just follow NWUKTrafficAlrt in your twitter account.

Conference experience

nospam@example.com (Jeremy Coates) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:27:42 +0000

I'm currently sat in the PHP London 08 conference and just thought I'd post a note. I'm currently listening to Rob Allen enthuse about the Zend Framework in the 'my framework is better than yours' session.The three frameworks under discussion where Code Igniter, Symphony and Zend Framework. Having listened to all the debates, I'm still glad we've settled on the Zend Framework for our day to day work, just seems more flexible for existing and new projects at the same time - the others seem only to have relevance when starting from scratch.

The morning sessions in the main track seemed a little basic over all, however you have to pitch at a wide audience level so that's to be expected. Fortunately, Marcus Bointon after lunch (which was really quite nice for a conference) talked about mail() and all the things that go with that, handling bounces, VERP and a few other niceties. It was unfortunate that he ran out of time towards the end as it turned out to be informative and quite in depth without getting to the point of boredom - I've found his slides on-line which should help finish the learning.

phplondon08: Conference approaches

nospam@example.com (Jeremy Coates) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 23:20:12 +0000

I'm now looking forward to the 3rd annual UK PHP conference this Friday. I went to the conference the first year it ran and it was good to truly geek about the language, I couldn't make last year as I was on my way back from Australia (was actually between Syndey and Dubai at the time!) so I'm over-ready for another PHP geek dose.

My only problem now is deciding which track to follow on the day - choice is sometimes not a good thing! Perhaps the sessions will be videoed and I can see all of it.

While I'm in PHP geek mode (I am every day but that's what I get paid for), I've just discovered the PHP Podcasts web site - I've got that linked in the feed reader and am already starting to enjoy the aggregated content.

GeekUp Leeds: YUI Javascript Evolved?

nospam@example.com (Jeremy Coates) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:49:55 +0000

We've started to use the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) a lot here at SPM and so I was intrigued when the Leeds branch of GeekUp were having Christian Heilmann from Yahoo! to speak about it.

Whilst Christian's talk was an introduction to the YUI posing the question Javascript Evolved?, it was fairly basic for anyone who's used it in anger however it was a good talk, light hearted and well presented, ideally suited to the level of the audience. Christian took a straw poll of who had used the YUI to date and there seemed to be about 10 hands that went up around the room of about 70 attendees. This surprised me quite a bit as I thought it would have had a wider exposure - I'm sure it will after the presentation. For me it's the enterprise approach to the framework model that is YUI that won out over the other libraries out there. One of Christians' key points was that YUI is more than a library, in fact a true framework - JavaScript, CSS and widgets all available from a single source. The other thing I like about YUI is that it's developed by Yahoo! - who set a high standard in terms of cross-browser compatibility as well as understanding the nature of scalable solutions for their own sites. I'm looking forward to getting into the new features of the latest release of YUI version 2.5.0 out today! I hope that the new version doesn't break too much as I'm just in the testing phase of a project with a client and would like to get the new version in before it goes live - we shall see. If you missed the event, then Christian's slides are available on-line.

The man from Yahoo! also kindly brought some promotional merchandise along to the event - we all were then invited to put our names in a hat and a draw was then held. To my surprise my name was called out third and better than the t-shirts and beach balls that were won by some, I'd won one of the two copies of Christian's own book: Web Development Solutions - Ajax, APIs, Libraries, and Hosted Services Made Easy (published by Friends of Ed from Apress). I shall look forward to getting into that once I've finished my current read: Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 also from the same stable.

Metamorphosis

nospam@example.com (Jeremy Coates) — Tue, 15 May 2007 21:16:01 +0100

Just an intro for those who know us already as Co-Comp Ltd, well we're still that as a legal entity but we're now going by the name of Solution Perspective Media as that better reflects who we are and what we do these days. The new site, to go along with the new name, should be ready in a few days time, however I'm just putting the finishing touches to our revised content management system first - based on a combination of ZendFramework, ADOdb and XTemplate it's becoming a great tool - ask me for a demo when you see me!

New Staff

nospam@example.com (Jeremy Coates) — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 16:11:00 +0100

We've just taken on a new member of staff Rachel Williams as a designer / coach. This action should help out lots round here - things have been way too busy for a long while (hence the scarcity of blog entries!). Welcome aboard Rachel.

Her role is partly design (especially web design) based and partly as a business / life coach and so it's not the usual skill mix you'd find in a single person. However find that person we did, as Rachel is a fully qualified life coach and has done quite a bit of design work - she's now got to learn how we do things (HTML templating with XTemplate! ). Hopefully there'll be many new developments as things get settled in.