Magnetic Man - I Need Air

Wednesday, August 04, 2010     Read More

Social Feed Part 1 – The Database

This is the first part in a series of articles focused on building a web application with similar features to that of FriendFeed and Twitter.

So as I mentioned yesterday I am going to have a shot at building a web application similar to FriendFeed and Twitter, it’s going to be called Wandering Worlds Social Feed or wwSF for short.

To kick things off I’m going to talk about the database. wwSF will be a very data heavy project and we need to make sure that the data going into the database is put there in a logical way.

Here’s the first run through of database tables I believe I’ll require.

Database Tables

User – This table will hold all user information.

Content – This table will hold all content, both created and aggregated from other sources.

ContentType -This table will store a unique identifier for the services we will be aggregating (Twitter, Flickr etc) and also types of content postable from the application (videos, photos, text)

Relationships – This table will hold the relationship (friend)  information between users.

Comments – This table will hold all comments, comments can be posted to all kinds of content.

Likes – This table will hold all likes, all kinds of content can be liked.

AggregationData – This table will hold all aggregated user URLs, last time the data had been refreshed etc/

Here’s a little diagram that I modelled in Visio to give a more graphical representation of the relationships between tables.

If you have any suggestions for ways to improve the design or even a better way to structure it then let me know in the comments.

Tomorrow I’ll go through building the DB in MSSQL 2008 and creating the LINQ to SQL classes.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010     Read More

Left vs. Right

This is one of the coolest visual representations of the major political beliefs I’ve ever seen. actually I think its the only one.

Click for the full size image!

P.S I’m on the left.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010     Read More

The Brain

This is an amazing talk, please watch it!

Wednesday, April 28, 2010     Read More

N900 Walkthrough Video

I’m on my way home from Greece, this video give a very good walk through of the N900. I really like the idea of different screens for different scenarios, anyhoo check it out.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010     Read More

N900 Videos

I had to post these. I was a massive fan of the N800, I ran one of the biggest news sites on the net for it. Nokia have just released some videos of the new N900.

It may be a little late for this to gain any kind of wide acceptance, but it does look like a very very slick device.

Will I get the N900? I’m tempted but I’d like to see some video reviews first.

What do you think of the N900?

Wednesday, April 28, 2010     Read More

friendfeed is gone, let’s build another!

Well friendfeed has been bought by Facebook an people are freaking out all over the place.

Get a grip, the world is not ending!

Congrats to the friendfeed team I’m sure they are going to be able to make a real difference over at Facebook. I hope to see some of the great aspects of friendfeed integrated into Facebook.

Now on to the more exciting and fun part of this post. I’ve decided to have a crack at building my own friendfeedy/twitter/pownce kinda site, talking to JC today made me realise that I have a few interesting ideas that could be cool. This project is not going to be my full time job or anything, just something I’m going to be developing and playing with in my spare time.

I’m also going to document exactly how I’m building it via this blog! Sharing code etc, if you are interested in helping me build it post a comment, or contact me on Skype: matthughes.82.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010     Read More

Bing! I’m impressed

Around 4 days ago I re-launched my travel information blog (Wander the World); I decided it was about time that I started writing again, especially since I’ve been in London for over a year and have a few more stories to tell.

This morning I took a look at my analytics statistics and saw that I already have had traffic from Bing! It’s taken only 4 days and the site is already showing up in their results.

Bing has been my default search engine for a while now but I had no idea that it would be that quick to crawl my site, it’s not even in Google!!

Well done Microsoft and the Bing team looks like you have a true winner on your hands.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010     Read More

Busy few weeks!

It’s been a while since my last update, I’ve been a busy that’s for sure.

My main project for the last few weeks has been creating a custom support ticketing system for Wandering Worlds. I figured that its going to be a lot easier building my own system rather than shelling out $500+ for a ready built solution.

The system is simple and quick proving all the basic features you would expect from a web support system:

- Status based tickets  and updates
- Email Notifications
- SMS Notifications
- Support Dashboard with all tickets / statuses

I’m going to be rolling it out for all my clients in the next few days; hopefully some of them will be interested in rolling it out for their clients.

I’ve also been adding hostels and new features to Quick Hostels, the sites traffic is pretty stable at the moment; I have not done any advertising or anything like that I’m waiting until I reach over 1000 hostels. The features that I have added though are keeping people on the site which is great to see.

I leave you with a video from on of my favorite bands.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010     Read More

Getting Clients to Pay?

Being new to working for myself I’m finding it tough trying to actually get clients to pay up. It’s either invoice emails being ignored, them forgetting to pay, stuff ups in accounting, the list goes on and on. Does anyone have any tips on getting clients to pay?

Wednesday, April 28, 2010     Read More

Social Media and Negativity

Over the last few days I’ve noticed that there has been a lot of negativity directed at Bing, Office 2010 and Microsoft in general. The guys over at Zoho seem to post a blog per week about how Microsoft is failing at this, that or the other.

I’m a big user of Zoho and so is my company, but for some reason I’m tired of reading that kind of bullshit every week, it’s actually turning me off their products.

I’m just really tired of negativity in general! I am guilty of being quite negative at times, but recently I’ve started taking steps to turn that around and lead a more positive life.

Meh, that’s it really. Stop all the negativity people, it just not cool.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010     Read More

GaiKai, where gaming is headed

This is the future of gaming.

Streaming videos games to your browser, no installs, no expensive hardware. Give me some kind of subscription model that is not too highly priced and I’m won over.

I can only assume something like this would be bundled with internet service provider, you’re going to need a fairly decent connection for this to run smoothly.

I wonder how long we’re going to have to wait until this kind of technology starts rolling out, exciting times ahead for the gaming community.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010     Read More

Quick Mosso / Rackspace Cloud Q&A

I’ve noticed that a few people are finding this site in searches for Mosso or the Rackspace Cloud, here are a few answers to some of the questions people seem to be asking.

Does Linq to SQL work on Mosso / The Rackspace Cloud

Yes, it works perfectly. Quick Hostels is all Linq and it runs without any issues.

Do GoDaddy SSL Certificates work with Mosso / The Rackspace Cloud and how do you install them.

Yep they work fine, you need to contact the support department and they will install it for you. It will not install properly via the control panel.

ASP.NET Medium Trust Mode

Mosso / The Rackspace Cloud run all of their IIS servers in medium trust mode, that means that some applications and components will not work. Check out this great article from StackOverflow for more information on medium trust mode and how to code for it.

I don’t work for Mosso or anything like that just a big fan of their service!

Wednesday, April 28, 2010     Read More

IIS7 URL Rewrite

I figured out how to do this today, it’s super simple so I though I’d share how you can do it.

Basically we’re going to make some changes in the web.config file, you need to make sure that IIS7 has the URL Rewrite module installed or else this wont work, I use the Rackspace Cloud and it is installed there by default.

We are going to use the following example:

http://www.domain.com/article.aspx?id=1?title=urlRewrite

rewritten to become:

http://www.domain.com/article/1/urlRewrite

web.config

Place the following between the <system.webServer> </system.webServer> section of your web.config file:

<rules>
       <rule name="Article URLS">
         <match url="article^([0-9]+)/([_0-9a-z-]+)"/>
         <action type="Rewrite" url="article.aspx?id={R:1}&amp;title={R:2}"/>
       </rule>
</rules>

And it’s done, it is really that easy.

Now all you need to do is edit your application so that it spits out the new URL format, unlike LinkFreeze you have to do it all manually.

I hope that helps people who are looking for a simple example some of the official stuff is confusing.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010     Read More

The Last Percent

So I’ve been working all weekend on migrating my sites over to Mosso, most of them are over there and working perfectly but one required massive rewrites to run under medium trust.

Linq has now become an invaluable part of my coding life. Moving from 100% stored procedures to Linq to SQL has saved me so many hours of manual bullshit. I still do use a few stored procedures here and there but they are all accessed via my Linq DataContext.

By this time tomorrow all of my sites will be on Mosso; so far I have nothing but good things to say about their service and support.

Hope everyone had a good weekend.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010     Read More

Migration Moving Along

So the migration of all my sites over to Mosso is progressing. I’ve recoded Quick Hostels to run in Medium Trust mode, it wasn’t as tough as I expected. I ended up recoding the database layer moving everything over to Linq.

Linq is pretty funky, I’m new to it but so far I’m enjoying how easy it’s making things. Being able to do all my basic SQL tasks via Linq has saved me a bunch of time. I’m only coding up stored procedures for more complex queries; I’m actually seeing an improvement in performance as well though that could just be the new server environment.

The next few days are going to be super busy I need to port over 5 different custom CMS’s and 2 large client sites. The big cut off day for my Australian server is the 27th so I want to have everything ready to go at least a few days before then.

Oh, check out the first 2 reviews over at Sip A Dee Doo Dah; Julia has posted:

Shandy Bass – Made With Real Beer!

Tizer – Now With Added Bite

We have a few more reviews going up tomorrow a crazy coconut drink and a classy juice!

Wednesday, April 28, 2010     Read More

Mosso So Far!

So I’ve been looking for a good way to save money on my hosting bill. Currently I’ve got a server based in Australia running Plesk 9, the server has been up and running for close to a year now with no issues to report. As Wandering Worlds has been growing recently and we’re experiencing 5-8% traffic growth month on month our little server is starting to max out.

Now adding more RAM to the current server is going to cost me around $100 for another 1gb. Now $100 may not sound like much, but I wanted to see if there were smarter options out there.

I first saw Mosso on Bwana’s FriendFeed stream, he had one of his posts linked by engadget and his site handled the traffic without a hiccup.

After checking out the Mosso site I noticed that they had a 30 day money back guarantee, plus a $25 off your first month promotion. I signed up on the spot!

Now here are things I like and dislike so far:

Like

- Hybrid Hosting Technology; the ability for me to run .NET on a windows server and PHP/Ruby on a Linux server, allows me so many more ways to provide solutions.

- Live Support; If I have a question I just click on live chat and someone is talking to me within 2 minutes, that is fantastic.

- Ability to remotely manage my databases via SQL Server Management tool is brilliant!

Dislike

- SQL Server Costs; $5 for 100mb of SQL Server space? Not even sure if that space is shared over all my sites or dedicated for just one. Do I need to spend $5 for every SQL db I require?

- All .NET applications run in Medium Trust; None of my applications run at all. Lucky I’m running this side by side with my Australian server because I’ve got quite a bit of work to do getting those web apps running again. Why is there no warning on the purchase page

- A little tricky setting up Full Text Search on SQL Server 2008

- No easy way to get a dedicated IP address; I need one of these for a client that has a special setup. The apparent way around it is to purchase an SSL certificate for $20.

 

So there you have it what I like and dislike so far about Mosso. Recoding my web applications to run under the Medium Trust environment is going to be a lot of work, but it’s something that maybe I should be doing anyway.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010     Read More

Sip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah

Today I set up Sip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, a drinks review blog. After tasting a bunch of crazy drinks over the last month a good friend of mine suggested that we write down our drink adventures. We’re going to be doing 3 to 4 reviews a week, starting off with text but hopefully brancing into video later in the year.

Going to roll out the first review around this time tomorrow so keep and eye on Sip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah!

Wednesday, April 28, 2010     Read More

QH Google Map Integration

Wednesday, April 28, 2010     Read More

Credit Crisis Explained

Wednesday, April 28, 2010     Read More