The following guide came about after I was tasked with transferring my Web Development expertise into two VB developer colleagues. No mean feat in the one month I have left at my current place of work. Ultimately it’s possibly a futile task, but it’s worth a shot.
Web Development is not just collection of related technologies. [...]

Update: April 2010
This post was originally publish in 2008. Things have changed. a lot. Read on.
Ordnance Survey have open sourced a huge chunk of their data. This hasn’t been widely publicised , but the full set of geodata for all UK postcodes is available for free from OS OpenData. For geocoding UK postcodes it’s the [...]

Below, I share with you an excerpt from quite possibly one of the funniest things I’ve seen on TV this year. These guys are real hustlers for sure. They certainly know what’s up.

And there was me using BitTorrent and Rapidshare to download installerz, keygenz and serialz. If only i’d known that I could just drag [...]

IE7, don’t you just love it? What they gave us with one had in terms of CSS actually sort of working they took away with some of the stupidest niggly little bugs ever. Here’s another potentially large one i’m stumbled right into recently.
If your user agent string is more than 260 characters in length then [...]

There currently an inconsistency between the jQuery UI tabs plugin and the CSS generated by Themeroller

The CSS includes rules for “.ui-tabs-nav-item” but these classes are never added to the list items by the plugin. Because they are unnecessary.
Simply changing the rules to “.ui-tabs-nav li” they way they should be brings it all into line again. [...]

It occurred to me today that when using jQuery’s handy little .getScript method that each script request is appended by a timestamp appended to the querystring. This is great. A lot of the time this is exactly what you want as it ensures that no browser will ever serve up it’s own cache in preference [...]

Update: October 2008
As of this month, last.fm have started providing an official RSS feed for loved tracks (Thanks Anil!). My homebrew feed, the original subject of this article, will be retired at some point in the near future in favour of the official feed.
The Official Feed
http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/user/jamiethompson/lovedtracks.rss

My Original Homebrew Approach
Ever wondered why last.fm don’t provide an [...]

With a view to writing a jQuery UI integrated with the offline functionality of Google Gears i’ve been toying with some code to poll for network connection status using jQuery.
The Network Detection Object
The basic premise is very simple. We create an instance of a network detection object which will poll a URL at regular intervals. [...]

For those who are interested I’m going to start documenting the upgrades and improvements I’m making to citynoise.org over the coming months. The site has been struggling under some pretty heavy traffic and several internal optimisations including query caching for some of the more complex database operations has gone a long way towards making the [...]

As has been widely reported, it is still possible to successfully download the x264 MPEG streams of BBC programmes from the BBC IPlayer service but that they are now XOR “encrypted” in such a way that they will only play on Apple mobile devices.

It’s not really encryption, is it
Long story short, the streams are [...]