Month of December, 2007

We've reported a couple of times on the BBC iPlayer and looked at reviews from other sites slating it. There was issues that the BBC had wasted license payers money on some software that was useless and no one would use, however it seems our concerns have been listened to and a new version has been launched that is greatly improved.

So whats made it so much better?

There is now no application to download just for streaming video - it is all done through the web browser. This makes the whole experience more like viewing a YouTube video, it is faster and more reliable. All the videos are in wide screen (unlike YouTube) and the quality is almost as good as normal TV (you can see slight pixelations in full screen when sitting close to the screen).

It is also cross platform now meaning that the iPlayer will work in any browser with Adobe Flash installed (96% of browsers) on Windows, OS X and Linux.

Watching Ricky Gervais's Extras is now a breeze through the updated iPlayer.

The BBC Radio Player has also been rebranded as part of the iPlayer, the content has not changed and Real Player is still used for streaming.

Overall the updated iPlayer is a huge update bringing the BBC's content into a more accessible modern era.

For more check out the BBC iPlayer.

So many memorable things happened in 2007. We should probably start hiding the evidence, now.

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NSFW

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uh oh

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It's that time of year again when I round up the best of the year in my yearly review. 2007 has been the best year ever for ImAFish with over 250,000 visitors! The year started out strong with our Vista in Virtual PC review and part two of our highly successful Cashback article series.

ImAFish went from strength to strength and in May we stormed the web with an article about tweaking OS X. The story hit the front page of news sites all around the world including Digg.com where we got 1629 diggs. In one day the article received 33,000 hits and by the end of the week over 100,000. Fortunately our hosting survived and I used a whopping 50gigs of bandwidth in one week.

In June we partnered with the newly started Health Harm EMR website with two articles about the health effects of electric magnetic radiation. I covered my two holidays this year, the first to Egypt and the second in the Autumn to Hong Kong (check out some of the awesome photos I took).

Over the year we've had visitors from almost every country in the world.

In November I refocused the advertising efforts on ImAFish experimenting with PayPerPost and TextLinkAds. The result tripled the monthly income of the site. The year has ended with a number of successful posts including my trip to the Good Food show where I met Levi Roots.

Apart from ImAFish everything is going well too, I've had my first full year of working. We have some interesting projects in the coming months and are moving offices in March to the Pump House.

Many thanks to all the people who have contributed to the blog, articles, extra and forum over the past year and lets hope 2008 is as good as this year!

Not everyone can have cool powers, like the ability to manipulate time or steal powers. Someone has to be Maya and Alejandro Herrera.

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For those with an Intel based iMac ies4osx will install Internet Explorer on OS X. You can choose which versions you install (or select all of them) then the program downloads and installs everything automatically in to the applications folder.

A rather suitable icon.

The program works by using Darwine to run windows based applications. Full installation instructions are available on the ies4osx website.

I found Internet Explorer to work without any problems and perfect for testing websites when building them.

ImAFish has suffered a critical hardware failure causing the site to be offline for two days.

More to come soon.

Thanks for your patience.

I have always wanted to do this.....it would be neat to look at when you are old.

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My latest article talks about some of my top tips for the open source content management system - Drupal. If you use Drupal or are considering it as an alternative from Mambo or Wordpress then its well worth a read.

Read more about My Top Druapl Tips on ImAFish Articles.

I've been developing web sites using Drupal for over 18 months now, for me the flexibility and modules available for Drupal make it the best and quickest way to develop a website. Here are some of my top tips:

1. If you want to edit the layout of the site maintenance page you can find the CSS file in misc/maintenance.css.

2. After I have installed Drupal I first enable clean URLs then enable the path module. This means I can build basic SEO in from the start. If building a blog or articles based site I like to use the path auto module to automatically specify the URL.

3. When designing a site I like to build it in Dreamweaver first, then I copy the PHP template tags in from another template (often bluemarine). In the past I would customise the garland theme however there was a lot of extra CSS that I would often remove.

4. To create a template for an individual node type create a file in your template directory called node-nodetype.tpl.php where nodetype is the node type. (ie node-story.tpl.php for a story node).

This is really useful for customising individual nodes especially when using CCK and the views module. For instance I recently built a ticket support system for a company, by integrating a view into the company node you could immediately see the open tickets for that company.

//load the view by name
$view = views_get_view('view ticket');
//output the top three items in the view with the node title as an argument
print views_build_view('embed', $view, array($node->nid), false, 3);

The above code is for inserting a view into a node - more in the views documentation.

5. When first developing a theme I change the administrative theme to Garland or Bluemarine so that I can still access all the administration sections in order to enable menus, blocks, CCK and other configuration options.

6. In Drupal 5 a top border is added to tables. If this messes up your theme edit modules/system/system.css and comment out or remove line 18 ( border-top: 1px solid #ccc; ).

7. The TinyMCE module allows you to turn a text area into a WYSIWYG editor giving you formatting options such as bold, italic, underline, text direction, links and images. The module IMCE adds image upload and resizing support to TinyMCE.

8. When upgrading from Drupal 4.7x to 5x I often have problems with IMCE not working with TinyMCE, to revolve this remove the TinyMCE profile and recreate it.

9. If you enable a lot of modules you may get php memory errors, to fix this add:
ini_set('memory_limit', '20M');
to the sites/default/settings.php file. You may also have to do this on the pages that have the errors to.

I usually add it after the other ini_set variables in the settings.php file.

10. When developing I like to have the cache disabled, once the site is ready to launch I will set it to normal mode. The same goes for aggregating and compressing CSS files.

11. When having to create user profiles I use the node profile module along with the CCK (content construction kit) module rather than the profile module included with Drupal as default. CCK gives you a lot more flexibility and there are many more customization options. Also by making a profile a node you can theme it easier (see #4).

12. In Drupal 5 you can specify a default front page from the site information page however an easy way to create different front pages for authenticated and non authenticated users it to use the front page module.

13. In Europe we display the date in the format Day/Month/Year though in America they display it at Month/Day/Year fortunately in Drupal this can be changed in Site Configuration - Date and Time.

14. The XML sitemap module (formally gsitemap) allows to you generate a sitemap from your Drupal site to add to Google.

I took this screenshot earlier from the sports pages of the BBC website. I think Lewis Hamilton is great but there must be some other news in Formula One apart from Lewis Hamilton?

While that might be a creative opportunity for artistic photographers and designers, for news editors, it can all be a bit of a nightmare — and for readers too when the photos skip the newspapers and land straight in your mailbox. Here are seven of the most famous photoshop fakes.

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This may be the funniest captioning mistake I've ever seen.

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If you've ever been interested in purchasing a computer encased in a NES console, now's your chance. This mod is for sale via Ebay France [...] For those of you like us who've developed more of a "look but don't touch" policy when it comes to cool mods, and therefore have no interest in bidding, check after the break to see more pictures & a video

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Hundreds, perhaps thousands of articles have been written about the vulnerability of WEP (W ired E quivalent P rivacy), but how many people can actually break WEP encryption? Beginners to WEP cracking have often been frustrated by the many wireless cards available and their distribution-specific commands.

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Earlier today I went to the BBC Good Food show at the NEC in Birmingham, here are some photos from the day:

The show was packed with people and stands.

Benjie and Jack enjoyed sampling the wine.

These two sheep were on the Ireland stand.

I met Levi Roots - creator of the Reggae Reggae Sauce. Last year he successfully tamed the Dragons on BBC 2's The Dragons Den for investment in his sauce.

There were demonstrations all day from well known chefs.

The Well Hung Meat Company.

I bet he works at LEGOLAND®!

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