This post is in progress.
Making updates and retrieving data after the initial load needs to be done using ajax. If you try to load another web page from a webapp, the iPhone takes the user into safari.
Apple have good details of the meta tags you can use to customize how iPhone handles your webapp. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been working on a database for BYP to help me keep track of the people involved with Cinders. I have email distribution lists and release forms to keep track of. It will also be helpful when producing the credits for the film.
I wanted to put the database online so it’s easily accessible (by authorised users). I started with DaDaBik to quickly build a PHP frontend to a mySQL database. Read the rest of this entry »
I got a book about taking photos. It was cheap, but turns out that when it was written, any camera worth using was still analogue or wet. It talks a lot about chemicals and filters and film. However – I’m sure most of the concepts are still the same with digital photography, so I’m looking forward to developing some skills.
The first thing I’ve played with is the rule of thirds. Apparently you shouldn’t normally put your subject in the middle of the photo. Who knew?! I had a go at cropping photos taken at Kew Gardens a couple of weeks ago using the rule of thirds. Has it made the photos more vivid and captivating? Read the rest of this entry »
Caroline and I enjoy photography. We don’t have a lot of time to really develop skills, but like having collections of photos. When we went to New York in 2008, we planned to get our first SLR camera. Instead we got ripped off and came home with a point & shoot pretending to be an SLR (Panasonic DMC-FZ1) having paid twice what a consumer SLR should cost.
This time we were more careful and calculated and I managed to find a brilliant bargain for a Canon 450D – an actual SLR! We picked it up from Comet last night and had a play around.
Another example of where I just had to wait.
I’ve wanted push GMail since I got my iPhone over a year ago. Read the rest of this entry »
This weekend Caroline and I joined her brother for his 25th birthday party. He hired a canal boat from a nearby town, to drive it to Chester for the party, then drive it back again after. Read the rest of this entry »
A few times I’ve desperately tried to find a way to do something that could be simple, but is technically a bit complicated, such as being able to have a subset of my iTunes library only MacBook.
It usually turns out to be best to wait until Apple do it for you :p Read the rest of this entry »
Getting my blog online has provided a few interesting challenges. I’d been thinking about registering a domain to have a personalised email address for a while. This itself is a challenge – email addresses have two personalised parts, but we only really have one name. Fred Sherbet is a name I made up for myself years ago, since there are already so many Matthew Russells on the Internet. So far I’ve not met a single other Fred Sherbet.
Anyway, after registering my domains with Go Daddy I found they give free hosting with domains. I got it all set up and found it’s supported by a bar of ads. They aren’t too obtrusive so I enjoyed having a play and publishing using iWeb. (mattandcaz.com is still powered by iWeb but I’m not sure what to do with that yet.)
The trouble with the advertising was the way they get ‘injected’. They get applied to iframes, so embedding and widgets got ruined by ads. Also, wordpress didn’t just work – the ads broke certain functionality.
I run Backyard Productions’ website, and we have lots of spare space and bandwidth. I was sure there must be a way to forward a domain to shared hosting account, but it’s something Id tried with websites before and not got very far. Forwarding the domain means the user ends up with a different URL in the address bar. Forwarding with masking makes links to other pages look weird, and there’s no nice way to link directly to pages on the site.
I was sure there must be a solution and found that Go Daddy do allow hosting of multiple web sites on a single hosting account, if you have a deluxe account. This isn’t much more expensive than an economy account, so I paid the cash and we had even more spare space and bandwidth, but more importantly access to this multi-site feature.
Setting up mattandcaz.com was fairly straightforward. Although Go Daddys instructions missed out pointing the domain at the right IP address, they were quick to reply toy support request.
I had trouble getting fredsherbet.com online. It came online intermittently for a while then disappeared again. It took a couple more emails to go daddy, but they were helpful and we found that my DNS settings weren’t quite right – the first CNAME needs to be www and point to the top level domain.
Once I’d gotten that right fredsherbet.com came online 😀
Next on the list is customizing the look and feel, and also I’m setting up Fever RSS Reader (feedafever.com), which allows you to give it lots of feeds and the most talked about stories get promoted to the top of the feed. I’m hoping it’ll help me keep up with the ‘important’ stuff without getting overhelmed with the dull stuff. Also I hop it’ll help mr discover other good sites. I’ll update the blog with my experiences once i’ve figured it out!
Welcome to fredsherbet.com! This is my first personal blog, so I’m finding my way with it :p
I enjoy playing with computers, and am a computer programmer in North London. I built computers in my teens, but got into Apple computers in the last few years. Most recently I’ve gotten into web technologies, and having my own webspace that I can SSH into is quite exciting!
Anyway, this is my personal outlet – we’ll see where it goes…
What’s happening to the Mac Pro?
