BuiltByDave.co.uk The wireframe of a blog. </> feed

I couldn’t help but reply to Will with a little more then a list of tracks, it just seemed a little lacking. I’d never looked at the last.fm API but I figured I could probably throw something together quickly.

A quick page that gets your last.fm friends top 3 tracks.

I believe it’s actually a bad solution to the question, the 3 tracks you believe every iPod should have are probably not your most listened to tracks, but because I could, I did. Check it out:

http://prototypes.builtbydave.co.uk/lastfm-ftt/

Just over a year ago Josh and I were playing around with one of his ideas, similar to the Make Poverty History white band for the web that he did, but this time for the (red) campaign- just add a line of javascript to your site/blog and anywhere the characters R, E, D appear in that order we’ll change them to red’s branding, and link to joinred.com. You may have even spotted it happening on this blog of mine, for example in my post Google Application Engine vs Facebook f8.

We prototyped, we got feedback, we asked a few well known bloggers if they’d put it on their site, and all was good, however we came across a problem that I didn’t have the time, patience, or uber-javascript-l33t hacking skills to solve well enough. I’ve put the problem to a few fantastic developers, it’s made for great discussion, proved they are amazing developers with very creative minds, but yield a solution it did not.

Chatting with Josh the other day we decided we’d release it, incomplete & hacky. Should someone tackle the problem, fantastic. Everything is over at http://redyoursite.com (/test.html as well), if you do decide to tackle the problem please let us know, there’s a free beer or two on me if you solve it.

Update: So I didn’t explain the problem as pointed out by Dave and Mike on Twitter. I did that on purpose because in theory it seems far easier than it is in practice, and discovering that yourself is key (that and being over year ago my memory isn’t perfect). But, to summarize the issues are around a pages content, and not breaking it, so:

• “powered” should become “powe(red)”, however not if it’s a link as that would break the link
• changing attributes shouldn’t happen
• changing a node’s content should but not within certain node’s: textarea; select; input, etc.
• using the DOM was too slow for me (please prove me wrong) and it has to be fast, we can’t break other people’s load time
• RegEx speed was fine, however cross-browser issues plague it

Over the last week or two I’ve been beta testing the TrustedPlaces API, by building an iPhone and Mobile applications, and yesterday I put live PlacesByDave.com. TrustedPlaces liked the application, and it now runs their official iPhone application over at http://trustedplaces.com/iphone.

I’ve not 100% finished playing with their API, so you might see another feature or two appear. Watch this space!

P.S. thanks all for the feedback, please carry on!

Back in May I blogged about changing my passwords to be more mobile friendly, The year of mobile/cell? New passwords, now however, being on an iPhone, I’m on a QWERTY keyboard again. It was at this point I remembered a password generator I threw together in May/June time.

It uses quotationsbook.com’s feeds. Basically, you remember the quote, and, in-turn get a secure password. For example, search for keyword anarchy, and you’ll find the quote “Freedom without obligation is anarchy. Freedom without obligation is democracy“, which as a password is “fwoiafwoid“. So, check it out: Password Generator

These bloody cats are everywhere these days, and, after spotting that icanhaz.com was available we thought we’d add our contribution to the current internet fad, lolcats. So, just for fun we built a tinyurl but with nice urls, e.g.:

• http://icanhaz.com/builtbydave for my site
• http://icanhaz.com/jzawodn for Jeremy Zawodny’s blog
• http://icanhaz.com/feather for Derek Featherstone’s box of chocolates
• http://icanhaz.com/ciderthing for Brighton’s geek cider tasting event
• http://icanhaz.com/spiderpig for the Simpsons trailor

… you get the picture. We’ve got a few ideas for further development, but it is a side-just for fun-project, so as and when. Enjoy your new lolcat urls, or lolurlz, kthx.

J.K. blogged it, Jane blogged it, Will blogged it, there’s been conversations about it, what is it? Sussex Digital.

Myself and Josh a week or two back launched Sussex Digital. We’re planning on releasing a new feature every week (and have a few more to come yet) and we’re hoping to built a useful hub for the community of media, digital, and web types in Brighton, and surrounding areas. We want your feedback. We want to put the focus on Sussex. We want to put the focus on the community we’ve got here, and the people in it. We know it’s here, after all, we’re part of it, let’s give everyone outside a chance to see what we’re all doing down here!

It’s no coincidence that 3 of the 4 freelance developers listed at Google.com when searching for freelance developer are from Brighton (the other 6 are firms or resources)!

What does it do? Gets your friends 3 most recent public photos from Flickr in a mobile friendly page.

How did it come about? Josh and I have recently been discussing doing a few really quick, small but useful web applications. I commented on Seth Levine’s blog post Twittering Away which lead to an email discussion. I asked for his thoughts on Radar and later mentioned I’d been thinking about doing something much more basic, but similar with Flickr, as that’s where my data is. Then I found an hour to hack it together.

It was done very quickly so it’s not without problems (consider it beta), but is a good proof of concept, and I’m enjoying using it. Point your mobile’s browser to http://prototypes.builtbydave.co.uk/f3 to follow your friends photos where ever you are.