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.