Web Developer

Occasionally I talk about stuff and build some things (you know, websites, applications, jQuery plugins and the like) and this is where I try to write about them.

I work as a web developer for One Black Bear in Birmingham, UK

jQuery Translator

24 Jan 2010

jquery

A little jQuery plugin that makes use of googles language API to create a translator.

The plugin should ideally be run on either form (for dynamic switching) or the entire document when working on static content.

Automatic language sniffing
Supports as many languages as google does
After success hooks

Grab the plugin or view examples and more details.

23 Jan 2010

web

Amazon have set up version control on their S3 system ; it is currently in Beta (isn’t everything?) but looks like it could be very handy.

Having a scan over it the main problem I see is that instead of storing diffs between the versions of file they are storing the entire file again as a new object. As storage on s3 is insanely cheap anyway, you wouldn’t think its that big a deal, but think about it for a second.

If you are editing a high res video and storing it on s3, you could see your bills sky rocket. Lets say the video is 1gb, and you need to make lots of amends and get client approval for each one. With normal version control (something like dropbox I think is a suitable comparison here) you’d only be saving the changes between the original file and the current one. With s3 it’s an entire new file.

That is where you could easily end up using 10gb of storage by just amending a single file a few times. I can understand why, storing entire copies is easier then trying to figure out a diff engine capable of handling obscene file sizes.

22 Jan 2010

rant

Every time any of my friends or groups did anything you can bet your life I'd get a notification about it. I don't care if you've just bought 5 more sheep or got a full house, I'm not interested!!

You can turn most of the email about these off, but every time you log back in you'll get dozens of them in your face with each application wanting you to join up....

20 Jan 2010

work

Unsuitable and One Black Bear have got involved in setting up and launching a company to help people better manage their money and educate school kids on money matters, so we hopefully don’t see the financial meltdown again that we’re just going through.

A new website is on the way but in the meantime we’re trying to build up a social side to it.

If you’d like to get involved as a Beta tester once the site goes live, you can sign up here

15 Jan 2010

web

As I never seem to have the time to blog about much any more; it’s taken me far too long to mention this.

WAA used to have a reasonable website (I didn’t like all the pink). It was, most importantly, a valid XHTML site with only a single bit of flash. This version of their site had plenty of content, was updated regularly (until Chris Tomlinson left) with a really good page rank in google (If memory serves it was a 6).

What replaced it (not long after I left) was an abortion of a flash website, which I have already berated in an earlier post. Flash websites can still do well, if content is exposed properly. Theirs wasn’t. The number of times it was updated you could count on a single hand and they had removed pretty much every single article that had ever been written for that site. This is old ground; I’ve already moaned about it many times.

Towards the end of last year (2009) they launched a new website; and it wasn’t flash! Instead it is a good quality html website (no so keen on the design) with some fresh content. A positive move for a change; lets see what happens.