Tag Archives: anthonyjhicks.com
Last GPS Location
Posted on 29. Nov, 2008
I've created a sidebar widget (see on the right below the Lifestream) showing the last GPS location as reported by my iPhone when running the InstaMapper application. The widget picks up the last co-ordinates via InstaMapper API and overlays a marker on Google Maps. If you click the info bubble on the marker, there's a link to a full screen map as well. InstaMapper is neat!
anthonyjhicks.com v7.0 (beta)
Posted on 22. Nov, 2008
You should be seeing version 7.0 of anthonyjhicks.com, the seventh major iteration of the site since sometime in 1993-1994 and the first redesign since version 6.0 in December 2003. While many of the URLs still show a Domino NSF structure, this is just Apache mod_rewrite doing it's magic keeping all the old perma-links and search engine links alive - the site is now hosted at Media Temple on their Grid Service and powered by WordPress. WordPress is using the Fresh News theme from WooThemes, combined with LifeStream and the Tan Tan Flickr Photo Album plug-ins, and WordPress for iPhone. LifeStream is pulling updates from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Last.fm, Amazon and more. There's still a few dozen posts that failed to import and I'm not crazy about the videos page, or how tag and category views show only excerpts rather than full posts - more tweaking required. It's good to be off Domino though and able to take advantage of the great selection of WordPress plug-ins, themes and active community of developers constantly adding features - I know I don't have time to tinker with this stuff anymore (outsource!). While I gave up regularly blogging years ago, I will still post here occassionally and keep the running list of events and travel destinations up-to-date. 99% of links should work as before thanks to lots of nifty mod_rewrite rules and a redirect mapping table of over 20,000 entries. All the RSS feeds have moved but if you're reading this in your Reader, then it looks like the redirect to the new feed has worked.
New Website Progress
Posted on 08. Nov, 2008
The switch to WordPress is going well. The multitude of a quality plug-ins and the ease with which you can hack at all the PHP to get it just right make WordPress an awesome choice - not yet regretting giving up on my old code. I've been writing XML export routines to transfer over 4,000 blog posts and comments going back 10 years, having some problems pulling in rich media posts the way I want them. Also haven't quite figured out how I'm going to show my videos page yet, or how to handle redirects from old perma-links. Loving the Flickr Photo Album plug-in which makes excellent use of the Flickr API to suck all my albums, tags and pictures in from Flickr into my site. To have over 5,000 pictures completely externally managed yet so intricately threaded into my site is a credit to the Flickr API team - Flickr continues to be one of my favourite things on the web. Also very happy with the Media Temple Grid-Server hosting - it feels snappy and the control panels are the best I've seen ever from a hosting company.
Moving to WordPress and Media Temple
Posted on 06. Nov, 2008
After ten years of rolling my own blog software, I've decided to switch to WordPress, and host at Media Temple on their Grid-Service - I just don't have the time to tinker with this stuff any more! Looks like a majority of stuff will export across nicely, although redirecting perma-links is going to be a tricky one. I'll be using the Fresh News theme from WooThemes.
Redesign?
Posted on 23. Sep, 2007
Wish I could find some time and motivation to put together a new CSS design for my web site. Everything else is finished and ready to go including a fair bit of backend tweakage; and a reduction in content and sections to just about me, videos on YouTube, photos on Flickr, and the blog.
New photos uploaded from 2006 and 2007
Posted on 16. Sep, 2007
Now that all my photos are up on Flickr, I've uploaded a bunch of new sets from 2006 and 2007 that haven't been online before. Highly recommend the Bestival 2007 and Royal International Air Tattoo 2006 sets:
- London Randoms 2007
- Bestival, Isle of Wight, UK 2007
- Marble Arch Caves, Northern Ireland, 2007
- Royal International Air Tattoo 2006
- Royal International Air Tattoo 2007
- Boston, MA, USA 2007
- Harvard University, USA 2007
- MIT, USA 2007
- London Randoms 2006
- UC Berkeley Campus, USA, 2006
- Orlando, Florida 2006
- Crete, Greece 2006
- London Randoms 2005
http://anthonyjhicks.com/...
Anthony is on Facebook
Posted on 14. Jul, 2007
Friends only: if you're wondering why this site doesn't see much action, it's because everything is happening on Facebook. Add me if you know me. anthonyjhicks.com will be re-jigged to something new just as soon as I get some spare time. For now I prefer the privacy of Facebook for sharing updates with a select circle of friends and acquaintances.
http://www.facebook.com/...
anthonyjhicks.com to be revived
Posted on 13. Jun, 2007
New stuff in the works for this site:
- New look
- Combined all updates Facebook style front page
- Facebook integration
- New Flash based fast photo gallery viewer
- Dual-posting of all photos to Flickr
- Embedded instant playback movies in the Videos section
- Redesigned Currently information display
- Fix the real-time activity tracker.
- Remove trackbacks and comments capabilities
anthonyjhicks.com joins the Dot EU
Posted on 21. Apr, 2006
Despite EURid problems and 1.5 million registrations last week, as a result taking 10 days to go through, anthonyhicks.eu and anthonyjhicks.eu now resolve.
http://anthonyjhicks.eu/...
Blog post frequency - what to expect
Posted on 18. Feb, 2005
Not much activity on the blog front unfortunately. It'll probably be like this for a while. My time availability for surfing interesting tidbits has seriously dwindled this year with all my outside work activities and longer hours at the office. Put it down to a focus on taking advantage of London (well trying to anyway). Expect fewer posts, usually when I've only got something really interesting to post about, interesting being entirely subjective of course. I guess not really much change from the past few months activity. All you'll really see up here from now on is links to articles or sites of note, trip reports, amusing stories, maybe something mildly insightful once a year, and lots of pictures. You might get the occassional week in the review - which can usually be linked to procrastination due to some pending deadline (just like this post is!). So don't visit every day (like I'm sure you all do), just the occassional drop by is all that's needed, once a week or longer, or even better subscribe to the RSS feed and don't bother visiting at all!
Manual Failover
Posted on 22. Dec, 2004
Ugh, had some minor technical problems with my primary server. The site is taking ages to replicate across to one of the other servers in the rack at the Sydney data center, as I'm pushing all the data up from my server in London. That'll teach me for not setting up the backup server earlier. On the plus side, it encouraged me to configure the automated failover correctly. My web site now has a hot stand-by server with data around 5 minutes behind the primary server. If the primary server goes down a probe running every 10 minutes will detect it and automatically change the DNS entries to the stand-by server, a 10 minute TTL on my DNS entries ensures that the outage is minimal. As you can see I really need to find something better to do with my time right? :|
Carbon Dating Your Jaw
Posted on 21. Dec, 2004
I think I might finally take the advice of a good friend and ditch my 7 years of weblog archives. I'll probably only keep the last 6 months online, maybe even less. The rest will get locked down and require a password to read. I only really lose out for Google placement on perma-linked posts, but really the referrals are of no real use anyway. Could this be the beginning of the end of anthonyjhicks.com - weblog? Possibly. I feel a bit like I'm polluting the web leaving all that old comment out there unchecked. Seven years, bloody hell.
http://anthonyjhicks.com/...
Do you subscribe to my Avantgo channel?
Posted on 28. Jan, 2004
If you subscribe to my Avantgo channel, can you send me an email or leave a private comment in this post. I'm wondering if the 8 user limit imposed by Avantgo is a problem as it seems I might be able to raise this limit without having to pay the US$1000 fee to iAnywhere.
http://www.avantgo.com/...
Unintentionally leading people astray
Posted on 18. Jan, 2004
It amazes me the conclusions people jump to after clicking onto a perma-linked post from Google. Recently I had a lady from Canada assume I was an online store wishing me to urgently supply her with a Sony Ericsson Z600, another who concluded as I had my own amatuer snaps of Sydney 2000, that I could somehow provide pictures of the yet to start Athens Olympics and particularly of the Olympic flame, and several believing I was a flying school and offered both fixed wing and helicopter flying lessons. This is just a small sample of the disturbing number of enquiries from people making extraordinary leaps about what my site is about from just reading a weblog post. With people like this on the web, it's no wonder email scammers do so well. So to clear things up a little, I'm not an Olympic photographer, I'm not a flying school, and I don't sell mobile phones.
Sony Ericsson Z600
Voice-over-IP AudioBlogging
Posted on 15. Jan, 2004
While this post should probably be made by audio rather than text, I thought I'd better make the announcement here in text for the benefit of search engines. I can now audioblog via VoIP! A technically impressive implementation of VoIP audioblogging would see a pure end-to-end solution (err.. gag) with the call going right to a VoIP client running on my web server, however I cheated a little, I'm using a free FWD number diverted to their Iperia voicemail server, which records the audioblog as a WAV and forwards it to my web server for processing by the same piece of code that handles audioblogs from POTS.
This means I can pickup any IP softphone or hardware phone on FWD, and audioblog for free. As an added bonus I've also setup a free 0870 national rate number using CallUK who provide a POTS to FWD VoIP service, so if I don't have access to a VoIP phone, I can still semi-VoIP audioblog using POTS. With my existing POTS Callagenix audioblogging application, I can add a reasonable level of authentication via PIN request, unfortunately with FWD anyone can call my unlisted number and leave a audioblog without needing to enter a PIN. To get around this I plan to add an SMS based approval process where an SMS is sent to my phone when a new VoIP post is received, I reply to this with a confirmation to indicate whether it is my message and my web server will then post it to the weblog. So I think this might make me the first VoIP enabled weblog! :) .. ah yes, the game of firsts.. I'm probably not the first, but I'll claim it anyway. Gotta love it.
In related news, my site can also now handle multiple content messages such as MMS. Which means messages sent via MMS or email containing any combination of voice, images, video and text will be processed and assembled into a weblog post. I just need an MMS phone to test it ;) .. I also found a decent cheap UK based Email-to-SMS service called Textmagic. I've been looking everywhere for a good service like this. While there are plenty of excellent FREE SMS-to-Email services, going the other way costs money and most of the gateway providers aim at business for SMS marketing. I needed a consumer grade Email-to-SMS service so anthonyjhicks.com can return confirmations to my mobile when certain events occur on my site such as a confirmation or error message when email, sms and audioblog posts are processed. This means that when I'm on a long trip and I make heaps of mobile weblog posts, I'll know if they are actually being received by my web server. Before I never really knew whether the posts were getting through until I checked my site in a browser.
* POTS = Plain Old Telephone System
Currently in RSS
Posted on 13. Jan, 2004
I've finished a cut of my new currently channel in RSS, so those of you who read my site in a RSS reader can now see the regularly updated list of recently and planned activities that appears on the right sidebar of my HTML weblog. Currently is linked to my PDA's task list and calendar and shows noteworthy activities that are scheduled, in-progress or recently completed. My PDA automatically synchronises with Microsoft Outlook which then synchronises with a database on my web site. I like currently as at a glance in tells you recent or planned travel, restaurants, events, movies, theatre, books, pubs, bars, and gadget shopping in a nice up to the minute succinct list. The custom written synchroniser also checks for things such as URLs and ISBNs in the task and attempts to display extra content such as book cover, movie poster or image of the restaurant where appropriate. Give it a go.
http://anthonyjhicks.com/...
Argh.. anthonyjhicks.com not IE 5.5 compatible
Posted on 13. Jan, 2004
Oh dear, I just saw my site on IE 5.5 for the first time since to the cut-over to XHTML 1.0/CSS2. What a mess, damn CSS compatibility problems. This is why we use trusty tables for layouts, avoiding ugly surprises when you go and show someone your site!
Connecting to anthonyjhicks.com: No route to host
Posted on 12. Jan, 2004
A configuration error at my webhosting provider meant the subnet used by my server was deleted resulting in no route to network found errors when trying to resolve anthonyjhicks.com.. hopefully things are sorted now.
