The development of veerMe required not only the writing of client-side Javascript fo the more obvious funtionality and communication with the Google Maps API but splatterings of server-side code in the form of PHP to save and retrieve different types of data.

This post is just a quick reflection on the methods used to achieve the necessary functionality.

Saving Routes

Once a user has created their journey they can save it as a link to then access again at a later date.

Click here to view commented PHP for this action.

Viewing Routes

eg. http://veer.me.uk/r/?route=pneakv

To retrieve the route information I use the GET super global variable function to retrieve the ref value from the URL the user entered then et up a database query to get the information before feeding it into JS. This page was rushed (it was close to hand-in!) otherwise the JS would not be inline. I’m unsure as to whether or not there might be a better way of dynamically setting JS variables using PHP, if there is please let me know.

Click here to view commented PHP for this action.

Rating Suggested Locations

I previously blogged about finding a solution for a discreet location ranking system. My solution was to generate a rating for each location that was essentially just a percentage of times a place was added to a route compared to how many times it was suggested.

For example, once a user decides to add a point of interest to a route a JQuery AJAX function posts to a seperate PHP page the id of the point of interest and a boolean indicating whether or not it has been used.

Click here to view commented PHP for this action and see how it then deals with the posted information.

Third Party APIs

Because of security restrictions it is not possible to connect to XML files on different domains. The easy workaround for this is to use curl. Click here to see code.

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That’s all for now, its probably the most interesting PHP use from veerMe but there are a few more examples.

Hello fans/casual readers (ha ha ha),

This is my first blog post in quite a while, there is a lot to talk about. To summarise here are some things that have happened to me in the last few months:

• I completed and submitted my dissertation. Huzzah!
• Ditto with regards to my major project.
• I helped to organise the Interactive Media Production graduation showcase at Free Range (London) and at the Un (Bournemouth).
• The Modern Beardsmiths (of which I am a part of) completed their first festival appearance at BeachBreak Live 2009 (well, there wasn’t a beach but nevermind). This involved talking to a lot of people and selling face-painted-beards. A lot of fun and a bit of a tan is the result of this. A couple of other beardsmiths are doing a similar thing at Glastonbury this year, unfortunately I am not, so go check them out at the Shangri La area and GROW A BEARD!

Now, I am looking for a job so if anyone knows of any front end web developer roles going free please do get in touch!

Expect more indepth blog posts covering each of the above bullet points at a later date.

Peace out, enjoy the sun and festival season (if you’re going to any!).

veerMe (my major) finds locations in a database that are within a certain proximity of any given route and then suggests the ‘best’ of these to the user. The trouble is that if, for example, ten points of interest are close to a journey route then how do you know which of these the user might actually want to visit, and which of these are shit and unlikely to be of much use?

The answer, in my mind, is to order all of the POI (points of interest) by a rank and then iterate through these items checking for proximity starting at the highest ranked until you have found a reasonable amount to suggest (for example’s sake, 6) or until every POI has been checked – whichever comes first. This can prevent having to go through every single POI unnecessarily (which is a welcome bonus, I’m a bit worried the strain this might put on a browser as number of POI increases). It also means that you can just suggest the POI to the user in the order you find them and its likely to be the best.

This then creates another problem that I am now attempting to solve – how to rank these POI to reflect their popularity. I do not want to burden, or indeed have to rely on, the user having to rate locations because it adds another hurdle for the user and might not actually create an accurate way to rank the POI. If you think a place is awesome but don’t actually want to add it to your journey then chances are other people might not either.

veerMe gives the user four options when presented with a POI:

• Add this to the route and finish
• Add this, show me another
• Don’t Add, show another
• Don’t add, finish

This gives the user sufficient control over their journey preparation whilst also giving me feedback that can be used to help determine a POI’s route. (If a POI is recommended and the user clicks the 3rd option is might show that the POI is not suitable, whereas if they click the 4th option maybe they just don’t want to add a diversion to their route).

That’s all well and good but it still doesn’t help me actually rank the points, to do this I am going to need to use maths. Initially the idea was to simply start with a number (10) and increase the by an arbitary number (0.1) if a suggested POI is used, and decrease by 0.1 if it is not. The thinking behind this is that the higher the number the better the POI is perceived to be. A draw back to this, however, is that if a point simply hasn’t been suggested because it is hasn’t yet been close enough to a route it will remain on a lower number regardless of how good it might be and thus never really get recommended when in competition with POI that are more likely to be within the proximity of popular routes.

The alternative to this is to work on a percentage.  The number of times it is used divided by the number of times it has been suggested – giving you a number between 0 and 1 that seems to work a bit better and be a bit more proportional. Again in this case, the higher the number, the more likely it will be suggested.

What do you think, any suggestions are more than welcome! I am currently thinking the latter option is how I will do it but I can still think of a few drawbacks. The number of times it is used will have to start at 1 instead of 0 to stop them having a rating of 0 and never being suggested, for example.

I’ve been reading quite a lot of McLuhan for my dissertation. I’m specifically focusing on the idea that technology can be an extension of our central nervous system outside of the body.

I’ve also been reading a little bit about Rhizome theory which seems very interesting but everytime I think I have got to a point in my critical thinking/argument in the dissertation to introduce the concept and say how it is relevant I find that it doesn’t quite fit. I do think it has potential to become a key concept in pedagogy  when educational institutions realise that for every new generation of students who have grown up with the internet and other digital technologies the current classroom environment and teaching methods get less and less practical/efficient.

Anyay, I’m currently reading my way through a blog post written by William Gibson (author of Neuromancer) about cyborgs and one sentence struck me (just to contextualise, he was saying how change was happening in the 50s and before because of television) about what is enabled people to do. They are “viewing things at a distance, viewing things that had happened in the past, watching dead men talk and hearing their words”.

Dead.

Hearing their words.

Then a thought struck me. In extending our central nervous systems across such vast amount of media are we redefining the notion of “being dead”? Did the Gutenberg Press also impact on this idea, for in an oral society a persons ideas can only live on in the idea (thought/memory) of another person, in a literate age a person’s actual thought could be communicated without being recycled by another persons thought, even in death.

If our Facebook profiles, Twitters, Youtubes, Delicious’, blogs all survive as extensions of ourselves after our death then does this mean they are independent (or mostly independent, they’re not exactly autonomous or self-generating) of other parts of the CNS? It could be argued this spread of our CNS is non-hierarchical; instead horizontal, like a rhizome.

Even before the explosion of the internet age we could leave behind moments in time as photographs, anything we might have written down, us on video, etc etc. Text messages. Answerphone. Library record, etc etc.

By the time we die, have we extended so much of ourselves into other media that death is no longer finality?

And where could the future go? I wonder how unpredictable we really are. In death could the surviving parts of our nervous system one day be analysed for behavioural patterns so that our behaviour could be predicted accurately in spite of our death?

I remember someone mentioning to me that the brain is essentially a collection of millions and millions of 1s ands 0s that dictate our action and thought -  way beyond the current processing power of today’s computer, but if Moore’s Law works forever then its only a matter of time until a computer as capable as the human brain is invented. As far as I can gather, consciousness is a whole different matter and something much, much complicated (and until a machine can ponder that autonomously, we need not worry )

This is all pretty much late night ramblings so if anyone actually reads this and has some input, I’d love to hear it.

Well science fiction.

I have pretty much just finished editing the holding page for my major project over at http://www.veer.me.uk/. Check it out and let me know what you think. The plan is that any blog updates concerning my major will now be hosted over at that site instead of here.

Lately I seem to be learning alot of cool new stuff, probably because of actually doing more. Which is nice. I messed around with WordPress themes and some PHP to integrate the blog into that page, it is far from perfect at the moment but will do for a holding page. The forms are done using JQuery, and it’s ajax functions. Overall, I’m quite pleased.

I just signed up to AdSense, mostly to get an idea of how it works and stuff, but also because another site of mine www.gamefoe.co.uk – an old webzine I used to run back when I was much younger/more stupid – has a hell of a lot of content on it so I was thinking of trying to build a stack of incoming links (I suppose mostly from related blogs and Wikipedia) and seeing how that might drive traffic to the site, and also see how it might affect my PageRank, and also my search ranking for various terms (and how this might effect traffic from search engines which I imagine would be the biggest driver of traffic to an archived site like Gamefoe).

I think it would be quite interesting to get an idea of how much traffic is needed to generate click throughs, and how it all translates into revenue and if over the course of the year I can make £20 to go towards my hosting costs, even better!

I just need to find the time inbetween my dissertation, finishing my portfolio site redesign (the current design is horrid, too embarassed to link to it!) – which I will hopefully find the time to do this week, and my major project. The good thing is that I know I will inevitably wind up procrastinating time away that should be spent doing my dissertation by doing these other things so instead of feeling like ‘work’ it feels like a distraction, and I’m still being productive!

If anyone actually reads this blog (Hi mum!) then they may well know that I am a final year student of Interactive Media Production (BA)Hons at Bournemouth University.

As part of an attempt to flog ourselves to prospective employers and gain meaningful employment we are exhibiting our major project work at a graduation show in both London and Bournemouth. The London show is part of Free Range – Europe’s largest free graduate art and design show – which is pretty exciting and runs for a few days from the 28th of May. The Bournemouth show will be a week or so later, but more info on that when it is confirmed.

We decided on Screengrab 09 for a name and more information will go online at our new website http://screengrab09.com/ so check it out if your interested in the cutting edge of new media etc. Now to big myself up a bit: As it goes, I wrote the code for the nice little Twitter update feed in PHP (didn’t style it though). And I find myself on the grad show’s organisation committee.

If you are Twitter-savvy then follow us here.

This week I moved all my various online hosted stuff from my web-mania hosting (which ran out on Friday) over to some brand-spanking new hosting that I bought last weekend on Lunarpages. So far I am enjoying it. Multiple databases mean I can keep various sites seperate and better organised, and allowing multiple domains pointing to various folders within my sites is handy.

Also, have been in Uni more or less Monday – Friday from 10am – 5pm (and later!) for the last few weeks trying to make a dent in my dissertation and other week. It turns out I am shit hot at procrastinating, but finding that sidetracking myself by reading more isn’t really too bad is it? I seem to have the core arguements for my planned chapters sorted and just need to get down to knuckling down and writing the damn thing.

I am keen to get involved with Google Analytics to start familiarising myself with the idea of seeing how my users actually use my site, and where they go, where they come from etc. I don’t really have much practical use for the data at the moment but who knows, eh?

Finally, decided to play around with some CSS frameworks (well actually, just one framework – namely 960). Might be good for quickly banging out some rough designs, and just enjoying learning something new really. Check it out, seems quite useful – http://960.gs/

Hm, one more thing actually – any one able to recommend some good web development software (along the lines of Coda for the Mac) for the PC? At the moment I’m trying out KomodoEdit but although its really handy it isn’t quite the full package as far as I’m concerned. Not really massively keen on staying using something as bloated as Dreamweaver to be honest.

Sayonara, motherfuckers.

Got my hands on a copy of the O’Reilly “Head First Into” book for Javascript. I was expecting it to, you know, throw me in at the deep end but it didn’t. Maybe I could have hedged my bets and started in the middle somewhere, but fuck that.

I thought that seeing as the googlemaps API used Javascript then I would (in the long run) have less trouble with it if I properly understood javascript and how the browser runs it on load depending on where it is on the page etc. I’ve explained this before in a post. I also thought it would just be good to learn it, something new and all that. Anyway, bollocks to it that book was shite and I’m just using W3Schools.com as a reference now.

Idioms are great. “Went Down Like A Lead Balloon”. “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. “The whole nine yards”. You know the deal, phrases that most English-speaking people don’t understand the rationality of, and try explaining them to someone trying to learn English! Anyway, you have properly heard of Johnny Lee, the creater of the great Wii head tracking software hack, well he also has this addictive little site made called “___ Will ___ You“. The idea being that you fill in the blanks and his site displays the results.

Anyway the site’s use of javascript is pretty cool. It pretty much redefined what I thought of javascript, initially I thought it to be horrible popups and clunky and obtrusive. Obviously, these kind of fades etc proove me wrong!

So, new idea. Tonight I’ve made a page where I can add idioms to a database, and then another that converts this submitted data into some javascript arrays. I’m going to take make a site letting people add idioms, then also modify the idioms that are being displayed. I’ve got ideas of folksnomies as well but we’ll just see, eh?

The idea is simple, the only static language is a dead one. So what phrases are popular today, and how can we twist them (and keep twisting them) to keep them interesting. I want to use this idea as a continuing work in progress, using the development to solidify existing skills, as well as developing new ones. I’ve already stopped using the built-in Dreamweaver PHP/MySQL applications in favour of handwriting it all (probably to the benefit of exploitative hacker bastards everywhere) so thats one benefit to me, and I’m dynamically creating javascript, which is, y’know, something I don’t think I’ve done before.

Once there’s something up to actually look at I’ll let you know. Obviously, I might get distracted by the inane, or the boring, or the major project, or the dissertation, so it might never happen.

Drink of choice = gin and tonic.

I signed up to Twitter. Suppose that will probably negate my facebook status updates (or at the least, over ride them). Follow me here: http://twitter.com/danatello

Maybe one day I’ll get round to amalgamating all of my various online presences onto danatello.co.uk.

“For Christmas the perfect gift for my parents would be a toaster but I got that last year so maybe something that isn’t - boot lace boot camp liquorice allsorts allsports idon’t know mumble jumble sale kettle kettle kettle kettle toast.”

I stumbled upon a few articles about stream of consciousness and streamwriting techniques. Sounded like nonsense (I found the same streamwriting article in at least two different places), but the idea of teasing your subconscious out to see the results seemed interesting so I gave it a go.

I always considered that if I ever tried to lucid dream successfully, and had a conversation with someone in my dream, then I would actually just be talking to myself and so I wonder what sort of insight into my own motivations etc I could get? Or if it might be a way of accessing otherwise misplaced memories (like hypnotism)? anyway…

Basically, you write a title (I wrote a title, then the first sentence) then just write whatever comes to your mind – only I think its not meant to come to your mind but to the paper. This was my second attempt and I can’t really “switch off” from just thinking practically and ignoring unrelated thoughts. Will probably give it another go sometime.

The words after the hyphen read with a certain rhythm though I think, which is nice. Also, I can’t get them a kettle ‘cos the toaster I got last year matches the kettle they already have.