So I started a new job, got back into a rhythm of keeping up to date with the web world and actually did some development on my new site!

I spent some late night time looking into the use of, and integrating, the del.ico.ious api into a site on my local dev machine. Originally I was going to go with making json calls but opted for the api as it provided more detail on the post information returned. Which is kind of odd really, for example, by requesting json you don’t receive the date of the post but you do if you request using the api? (at least from what I saw during the brief time I spent looking). Also, by using the api I get some lovely neat XML that I can transform straight onto my page!

So anyway, it turns out its all rather straight forward to pull out posts from your delicious account and do pretty much whatever you like with them. My initial thoughts were to simply pull them out and list them so my personal site acts as an aggregator of my various other online accounts. With a tiny amount of C# I was able to achieve this in a very short time and once I can get my local site hosted somewhere I’ll put together a brief article on how I did this (with code examples). Not that anyone will be interested.. but hey.. it’ll be fun to write!

Additionally:

I finally took the time to fix the includes problem on my wordpress blog (mentioned some time ago) so now the sidebar returns!

in terms of a new site I’ve decided to take a quite backend heavy approach and look into tapping into a host of APIs such as Flickr, del.ico.us etc for the purposes of image galleries, favourite links type sections. Although i’ve heard, from a variety of sources, that this can be slower (both in terms of dev and user access to pages) than simply building a quick database of items to pull lists (images, links etc) out of. I’m hoping it will be an excellent learning opportunity.

I’m also dithering over whether to take the plunge and change my personal site to asp.NET (after working with it commercially for the majority of my post university experience) or stick with maintaining my PHP knowledge..

…more updates to come.. hopefully on my progress with the above.. as usual its a desperate situation of balancing social life, work life and ‘non-work work life’

employed work life has been dominating my web related activities for pretty much the last year so I shall be attempting to find time for this!

so i took the plunge and got myself a graphics tablet.. there goes my christmas money!

you can see a couple of examples of my idle sketching on my recently created deviantart profile. Now we can all see why I don’t ply my trade as a portrait artist…

firstly.. apologies to the Ian dury fans… this isn’t some kind of tribute!

instead its my own reason to be cheerful… I HAVE A NEW PC! woo look at me build it

also, I sketched out a few ideas for a new site but wasn’t entirely happy so the redevelopment has not taken place yet. However I’m well aware of how strongly I feel this should be revamped so hopefully I’ll come up with something soon. Watch this space!

I have briefly got the menu to reappear with minimal investigation. However if you have any problems please feel free to follow this link to get to the about page and use links from there: http://www.dimd.co.uk/about.php
this site is soon to be rewritten with the scope of this redevelopment including:

• CSS
• XHTML
• PHP
• MySQL
• Wordpress

Although satisfactorily providing an outlet for updates, portfolio hosting etc. it is due a bit of a respec, revamp and general clean-out/restructuring.

This process will be performed entirely offline before going live.