Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

I've spent the last few days writing a tutorial on how to build your own video site, and ended up with what I've jokingly been calling MyTube.

Like YouTube, it's full of short videos of cats, however unlike YouTube, you can take my code and stick it anywhere you like (In the upcoming magazine article I even show you how to build your own custom player with just 5 lines of code and a free web development tool).

Do you think I can sell it to Google for a couple of billion dollars?

The first application at my Web 2.0 sandbox is now live.

Have a play with The Flickr UK Postcode Interestingness Weather Location Explorer. Give it a postcode, and it'll show you the weather at the location, along with the most "interesting" Flickr image it can find nearest the pinpoint on the map. I'm quite pleased by the self-expanding search area that expands each time it can't find an image...

(It's a mash-up of Google Maps, Google Local, WeatherBug, Yahoo! Pipes and Flickr written for a magazine article.)

Update: I left out one of the instructions: click on the pin to get the pop-up once the progress bar goes away...

XAMPP, from Apache Friends, An Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl stack for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris.

I needed to get a working PHP install on my desktop here for an article I was writing, and spent several fruitless hours banging my head on configuration files for three or four different web servers from IIS to Apache to Xitami. It shouldn't be that difficult - and I used to run an ISP back when we had do everything with a small shell script...

Then I found XAMPP, ran the installer, coded up a quick PHP "Hello World" (in another of today's cool tools, the free PSPad editor), and everything just worked.

In less than five minutes...

It's nice when that happens.