Another minor update.

I've added another couple of small updates. First of all is the twitter feed which you can probably see on your right. I used the standard twitter widget, and just bunged the bird onto the bottom of it. I've also created a small PHP script that displays the five latest comments, who posted them, and what page they posted them on. I might work on an upgrade on this today so that if a picture was commented on, it displays that picture, and if it was a comment on a gallery.. I guess I could try and get it too display a mash up of the picture, but not sure how hard this would be too do with the PHP GD library.

I've also found the great website below If it where my home, which will compare the country your currently in against any other country. Its quite impressive.

The positive aspects of Globalization.

When I read the Undercover Economist my favourite chapeter was the one that explained why the cost of a cup of coffee at a train station is so extortionate because of cost of renting a space which will have such high coffee sales, and customers are willing to pay a premium. But the bit that amazed me the most was when the author explained that it's crazy that you can get a cup of coffee for £2.50 in the first place. The water alone must travel around 10 miles from the nearest clean source, the coffee machine is made in Italy, and the steel it's made from was manufactured in China from materials mined in Australia. The art project by Thomas Thwaites demonstrates this nicely, as he tries to reproduce a a toaster from scratch, including mining his own raw materials.

Though his point is how we're technologically ignorant of how even the simplest house hold object is to make and manufacture, its also shows how Globalization has really reduced the cost of manufactuing.

Happy festive season! All a bit quiet, but new welcome picture added.

I was hoping to get a lot done on this site over the Christmas period, but I didn't account for how busy I'd be. When you have a moderately large family, you spend a lot of time visiting and being visited by relatives. Who new? As it was a relaxed Christmas I decided to stay away from properly expanding my PHP or javascript / python knowledge, and made this happy robot picture (he's saying "Hi !!" in binary.)  After sketching it, I outlined it using Adobe Illustrator, and then polished it up in photoshop. I've got anther small project in mind, that could maybe even be used as a website background.

Best pictures page added.

So the highest voted page took a little longer than expected as I decided to delve into PHP's graphics engine. When you go to pictures/statistics you are greeted with the 3 pictures with the most positive votes. You can see what there karma rating is, and have a nice pie chart that compares the total number of positive votes against the quantity of positive votes that picture has. I really need to implement some code encase the total kama rating falls below zero, which would brake this system in a second (its hard to graphically represent +5 if the overall average is -32). Not really sure what to work on next. Maybe the beat machine. Maybe have a look at some projects on-line.

Vote Machine Added!

So I've implemented a fairly simple vote mechanism, you select if you want to upvote or downvote a picture, and then an entry is either added or amended in the MySQL database depending on if it already exists or not. If you vote it upwards, it gains a point, if you vote it downwards, it looses a point. Simple. I've already created a page that displays the top voted pictures. But I'm going to do a bit more work on it. I want to get PHP's GD system to create a simple pie-chart of how much of the vote each picture has gained. I guess I could display each pictures comment next to it as well.

The rickety mish-mash construction of this site is really starting to show through. There is no way to neatly display the vote system on the gallery view, so you have to click through to individual photo pages to vote. Also I'm not sure about this layout any more, it might be worth raising the site and starting again rather than attempting to edit what I've already got.

Orrery added, PHP cleaned up, IE compatible.

There has been a massive overhall of the site over the last week. The changes might not be that obvious because  have changed on the basic structure of the site. The basic layout of the site is now stored in a php file, so if I want to change the menu's or something, I now just have to change one file and not the 60 or so files that make up the site. 

I've also improved comparability with IE, now everything works with all browsers. Previous problems included the Ajax not being able to send, the drop down menu in the the photo gallery not working, and the page layout being not quite right. These problems have all now been fixed. 

Perhaps the biggest addition to the site is the inclusion of The Orrery. This page shows the planets size and speed to scale. I would have liked to do the distances between the planets accurately mapped as well, but the webpage would have been roughly the 1km long, which isn't very ergonomic. 

      You can highlight the planets to get additional information on them, and at the bottom is a button to slow the inner planets down so you can hover over them as well, they're a bit nippy otherwise. 

The next project will be a bit ajaxy again. I'm going to add a voting system, so that you can vote a page 'up' or 'down' and then have a page for the most popular items. Which will hopefully be pictures. If possible I want to implement this into the galleries. I'm also considering creating an on-line drum machine as a longer term project, but honestly not sure if I can be bothered yet, I'm also considering playing with google maps some more. 

First AJAX added!

I've now created my first AJAX. When you add a comment it is now verified using java at the client end, not the server end. Using Jquery I've created some nice drop down menu's that tell you when your doing stuff wrong. Still not really checked how it works on Firefox or IE..... I should probably do that. I'm now going to try and create a forum using Drupal, and also create a Orrery using Jquery, the idea being when you highlight a planet, a box will display information about that planet. I may also create yet another sideshow type gizmo at some point that shows new features that have been added to the website. Lot's to do!