03 - The Totality
You can download my third week's homework here.
Tumblr
07 - The Totality ↑
On Friday’s lab class, after speaking with Nick we discussed about rss feeds and the how to pull feeds from Delicious and Flickr. Nick was able to quickly show me Tumblr for doing some nice micro-blogging as a great way of creating an RSS feed for myself so I could pull onto my blog. Tumblr is a nice little application that is well documented, and explains clearly how to embed into your website.
Delicious
07 - The Totality ↑
I had set up a delicious account a few years ago but after using it for a few weeks to be honest I got a bit bored with it and forgot all about it and since then I been using my bookmarks on firefox to organise my bookmarks with tags. Since delicious has undergone a bit of a makeover and its integration with the browser with the handy little add-ons has made it a really nice bookmark website. Under the settings tab on my profile, I can go into the link rolls link and I can easily customise how I want my delicious links to appear on my site. Really like how this is all done in Ajax as the code is updated without the browser reloading the page.
Flickr
07 - The Totality ↑
I have always been tempted to sign up to flickr but as I am bit lazy when it comes to uploading photos and stuff like that I never took the plunge until now. I can see it being really useful to me this year, as I can use it to as another way of showing my photos from the work I’m doing as I’m going through my final year. Finding a tutorial on how to integrate flickr on my blog was more difficult than I thought, until I went into the help section on flickr. Here I had to create a flickr badge, which gave me a line of JavaScript that I could import into my site.
RSS Feeds - Simple Pie
07 - The Totality ↑This week I wanted to set my own task on researching into the possibility of pull any rss feed onto my own blog. After looking at Delicious and Tumblr they both provide details on how to do this, however, these details are using a JavaScript file to pull in the feed. So after a few google searches I came across a website, called feed for all, on converting rss feeds onto websites using a php script. Unfortunately, I could not get the file to work on the imdserver.
Then I remember that I had bookmarked a website awile back, called Simple Pie. This was exactly what I was looking for, and the documentation on this site is excellent. I went on to follow one of the tutorials and again came up with an error on the imdserver, as I received the following two error messages:
Warning: main(php/simplepie.inc): failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found in G:\ASPwork\ B00357573\03.php on line 105 Fatal error: main(): Failed opening required 'php/simplepie.inc' (include_path='.;c:\php4\pear') in G:\ASPwork\B00357573\03.php on line 105
I then realised the problem was with the server, as I copied the code over to my own domain on dreamhost and the rss feed appeared with no errors http://www.dannyturley.com/imd/03.php. With Simple Pie there was a compatibility test script, so I decided to test it out on the imdserver and from the screenshot you can see the settings on the server doesn’t support Simple Pie.
FLIR or sIFR3
07 - The Totality ↑
This week I have been looking at adding a dynamic way of integrating non-browsers supported fonts onto my blog. I have come across two very good tutorials on how to install FLIR. The first I came across was from nettuts. The thing I love about nettuts is how the first two links in big buttons are the source files for the tutorial and the live link to a demo of the outcome of the tutorial. The second tutorial I came across was earlier this week on divitodesign. I followed this tutorial but again (and it feels like its happening a lot to me lately), FLIR did not work out for me. I won't give up though but I think the php support level on the imdserver is playing a factor.
After testing and documenting both techniques I came to the conclusion they are both awesome alternatives to the default CSS typography. FLIR loads fast on your website and has a very easy implantation process, while sIFR uses Flash and has a more advanced installation method.
I would recommend choosing FLIR, because the ease of implantation and loading time compared to sIFR.
source - http://www.divitodesign.com
Due to server reasons I feel that although I would prefer to use FLIR as It is not depending on the user has already install the flash player on their computers, in these circumstances I should use sIFR. I found a screencast video on CSS Tricks by Chris Coyier. I have been watching this video and so far I have not been able to get sIFR working as of yet but I will come back and double check it later on, to see if I have just accidently left something out.
Prototypes
07 - The Totality ↑
In this week's lecture, Chris and Nick gave some real inspiration after talking about Grid's structure and I have began designing a new design for my blog. I got some good ideas from Colour Lovers and Kuler on good use of colours and I made a colour (or Color) Palette for my new design.
From this colour palette, and from some inspiration from Nick and Chris lecture I have made a quick mock up of how my new design may turn out. At the moment there is a lot development still needed. I have also came across a nice JavaScript tutorial called FlowPlayer that I am going to integrate into the navigation of the site.
Last week I came across the jQuery Plugin for the iPhone, and I wanted to test this out with my new acquired iphone developer tools. So I wanted to show this off by embedding a short video. I am hoping to keep this going every week to show the progress, and to include different types of prototypes.
Plans for Next Week
- Want to keep looking at sIFR3, hopefully I can get it up and working shortly.
- Want to look at more iPhone oriented sites such as Apps Amuck and a great article that Web Resources Depot have posted.