It’s coming to the end of the week and month so I thought I would update you on the week I’ve been having.

If you have been talking to me recently then you will know I’m trying to re-design my website; as with many designers, I’ve grown to dislike the current design, it wasn’t bad for my version of the site, I think it needs something more professional and has more dynamic features which I’ve been adding this past week.

Tuesday was presentation day; Rich Willars & I, as part of our “Dynamic Data Interchange” module at Staffordshire University had to give a presentation on XML’s role in Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web. I think it went quite well and we made a nice little Web 2.0 mashup which can be seen in the labs. It basically takes an RSS feed generated by iTunes which grabs the most downloaded songs on the iTunes store and using AJAX goes off to YouTube and then grabs the top 5 videos from the search which matches the the title of the track which can be watched in a lightbox style environment. At the same time it pops off to last.fm and grabs recommended tracks to the video that has been selected.

As my housemates and I are very big fans of the BBC’s Dragon Den television programme, We were very interested in watching Peter Jones’ new venture Stateside in “American Inventor” from Simon Cowell’s production team which brings you X Factor. We knew that it was going to be more X Factor and less Dragon’s Den but take nothing away from it, we have never laughed so much at other people’s crazy ideas for making themselves the “next great American Inventor”. With a panel of 2 American entrepreneurs, Peter Jones & George the “Lean, Mean Grilling Machine” Foreman on the show; I solely believe George Foreman was chosen for his pure amazement of any invention no matter how rubbish or ineffective and you are guaranteed at least one yes from the panel. The one we enjoyed the most has been put on YouTube by the guy himself so please enjoy as much as we did by watching this video.

Wednesday night has signalled the possible end for my iPod Classic. I received it as a Christmas present and have come to it today while it was charging on my laptop and have found that it had frozen which has happen before on my old generation iPod nano so followed the normal instructions given on the Apple iPod support website but to no avail, it seems to be in a constantly loop of showing me their logo screen and then making a flicking sound and then showing me the apple screen yet again.

I am going home for the weekend so hopefully the good people at the Apple Store Hull will be able to help me out and get my iPod up and working again as it one of my essentials of everyday life.

Thanks for reading

As a web designer / developer I like to visit a number of different websites but lately I find myself visting the same websites on a daily basis and I thought I would share these with you.

tubecast

I’m a regular reader of the “web designer” magazine and was reading their November Issue (issue 137) where they had published an article on the top 20 web 2.0 sites and found a great website at number 17 by the name of tubecast, it combines YouTube’s API and puts it into a form of flash-based web tv with channels for the different tastes in music from pop to alternative and dance to RnB and granted the quality of video is not of HD quality because of the obvious compressions involved when watching a video on YouTube in full screen but never the less it’s a great site which provides a constant stream of music videos which I find great when chilling out or when you are too lazy to keep searching for videos on YouTube.

Web Creme

A great website which publishes web site designs for other web designers/developers like myself to gain inspiration from others. I like to check it once a day just to see the latest designs which are coming out from fellow designers around the world, it features searches by colours the site uses. This site was pointed out to me by a good friend from University, Richard Willars and have not looked back since. It is a well worth look if wanting inspiration before designing a website or buidling a web application.

Adobe Kuler

Adobe have a great web site for good web-based colour schemes, I first heard about this again a couple of months ago while reading the “web designer” magazine. I am particularly interested in developing Adobe Air applications which I will talk about soon in another one of my blogs and Adobe have developed a good desktop application for Kuler. The Air applications shows user generated colour schemes and their hexidecimal codes which are sorted by recently added or most popular, if you get a chance to visit that site, you may see a familar colour scheme there as I found a colour scheme called “Kobenhavn Pop” which I found great for my site. I visit this again daily to see if there are any colour schemes which I could use for any websites I may have in mind to build.

Twitter

A website I should of been using a long time but I have to admit I’ve only just started to use and can see some major advantages of using it. Twitter is a web application which lets users of it constantly update their status on there by either using their website and logging in or sending a simple SMS with a registered number. This is really going to be useful when I optomise my site and incorporate this into my status when I can update it literally from anywhere as long as I have my phone on me.

I’ve been to a few live gigs and currently I’ve been trying to think of which one was best, there’s a few contenders, firstly; my first ever gig I went to was Coldplay at the reebok stadium, Bolton and that was an awesome gig to go to. I went with Daz (My Brother) and a couple of his friends. If you watch the “Fix you” video which was recorded live at the gig and squint really really hard, you probably still won’t see me because it’s hard to recognise yourself amongst 20,000 poeple.

The Kings of Leon gig was just a few weeks after that, if I look at my gig poster I can remember it was on the 10th July and I remember it was boiling in Bridlington. I went with my good mates Karl & Dan and the atsmosphere was electric, some serious mosh pit action was going on and was loving every bit! The definite tunes of that night were “Four kicks” and “The Bucket”

Back to recent times, last year I was very lucky to see both Razorlight and the Killers back at Hull Arena, both had recently released their second albums and they are both new classics! the Razorlight gig was quality! The place was packed out and everyone seemed well up for it, you could tell Razorlight were about to come on soon as there was a massive surge of the crowd to get close to Johnny Borrell and co. The best songs by far were “In the morning” and “Golden touch”

A month later and it was time for the Killers, we got there just on time as they were just coming out to begin their set as we (Me, Karl, my Brother; Daz and his girlfriend; sam) found a spot in the sold-out crowd. Some quality tunes from the Las Vegas band sounding great performing their new tracks and chucking out some first album legendary classics like “Mr Brightside”, “Smile like you mean it” and “All These Things That I’ve Done” I thought they played their legendary song “Glamourous Indie Rock & Roll” but I have been proven wrong by one of my friends! cheers Amy for that one.

So to decide which of those were the best I’ve ever seen is very hard but here it goes:

Like a radio DJ, I’ll count them down from 4 to 1.

In #4: Coldplay, was a great band to see but you can’t beat a gig thats a bit more compact and you can’t really get that with a Stadium gig.

In #3: the Killers, great band, great performance but I was still in awe of Razorlight and kept comparing the two bands and Razorlight won that battle.

In #2: Razorlight, just quality! the only thing that was a bit weird was Johnny Borrell’s white tight jeans!

In #1: Kings of Leon, first gig where I’ve been in the middle of a mosh-pit, I can say that I’m lucky to be alive after people trying to crowd surf on ur head and trying to crush you!

I’ve got to admit; I’ve never written a blog entry in my life; Mainly because I don’t really know what’s expected of a ‘blogger’. Do I tell people I’m a budding Web Designer/Web Developer? Yeah, might be a good start. Do I tell people I’m from Hull or ‘Ull as we say in our ‘local tongue’? Yeah definitely I’m mighty proud of my fair city, Second worst place to live in England; Certainly not. Where else can you ‘twag’ from school to ‘lark’ in a park and eat a ‘patty butty’?

What else could I tell you that you might not already know about me? I’m an undergraduate student at Staffordshire Uni studying Computer Science: Web Development, currently in my second year living in my own house with 3 other housemates.

I think that will do for the first of possibly many, I’ve spent a good 30 minutes thinking about writing this so hope you enjoyed and come back for more when it will get alot more excting (I hope but can’t promise!)