Mr. Speaker

Web Sequins have been infesting and interestifying the Web almost since its inception. They can delight, astound and disgust us. They make us dream of the Web that could, but probably shouldn’t, be…

What is a Web Sequin?

Let’s start with the concept of a Web Sequin: Like the much loved real-world sequins they are shiny and tacky and, despite our better judgment, can sometimes seem impressive at first glance.

Web Sequins are design elements or page widgets that utilise an existing technology in a creative, novel and terrifying new way.

They are not inherently bad - but merely a tool. And like pretty much all tools in the hands of the inexperienced, will be used for the purposes of evil, rather than good.

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Ooops. I accidently went and won WebJam 2 with little more than a handful of Web Sequins. Sorry about that! Well, what’s done is done; just be sure to carefully consider your voting choices in the future. When I’m a bit more sober I’ll get a write-up up here. Is that right? write-up up?

In the interim, such notoriety is likely to drive hordes of intrigued web nerds this way, so perhaps I should provide you all with a quick-start guide to the magical journey of Mr Speaker: The blog.

Now… I do try to make every post informative and mesmerising, but mostly they just turn out frivolously irrelevant. There have been very few highlights over the years. Here they are:

Hacking Windows Pinball
A cool cheat mode I found buried in the Windows Pinball code, along with a helpful guide for figuring this stuff out for yourself - an introduction to reverse engineering.

The Fonz uses AJAX to spy on you
Oooh… controversial stuff here! Well, not that bad, but at least it includes a damn sweet text adventure game to illustrate a point!

Beer o’clock - the Firefox extension.
A popular Firefox extension for counting down the minutes/work-in-progress-meetings/Simpsons’ quotes until that delightful beer o’clock.

Air CSS Battle
Using the same technique as my award-winning sequin, here is a DOM scripted version of the Atari 2600 classic - Air Sea Battle

Kentucky Fried Chicken Feen
Quite possibly the greatest food known to man. As invented by me.

Ok, maybe there are a few more nuggets to be found around here. I dare you to dig them up.

Tags: webjam, websequins, suckers

Oh if HTML could talk, the stories it would tell. Probably not all nice stories mind you. Through no fault of its own, poor old HTML has been the victim of many a harsh word from developers over the years.

But slowly people are learning who the real culprits are, and are using HTML to vent such frustrations.

It does feel good to vent-via-code I must say, and it certainly made me chuckle to notice a particularly nasty ID-based outburst from the coders at www.last.fm:

<div id="widget" style="display: none;">
  <input id="safariIsWank" type="hidden" value="" />
</div>

Maybe a bit harsh on ol’ Safari - but it would have been satisfying to type.

Tags: developers, HTML, Safari, Last.Fm

I’ve been running this-here blog for some years now, and I thought I’d share something interesting I’ve noticed: for a post to get 1 comment, it must first be viewed by 100 people. Pretty much EXACTLY 100. For 2 comments? 200 page views. 3 comments? You guessed it.

It’s really weird. Every post seems to average out to 100 views per comment. I dunno why.
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Yahoo! Pipes is seriously addictive. I’ve been up all night playing with it, when I should have been out drinking with friends. Social web indeed.

Anyways, this is what I’ve come up with - the Pipe takes a Last.Fm user name, grabs the recent tracks feed, does a “content analysis” on the tracks, and uses the output of this to grab a bunch of pics from Flickr. Theeeen, I use the JSON output of this new feed and fetch it in a Greasemonkey script. The Greasemonkey script fires when you visit people on Last.Fm, and adds the images below the user’s “Recent Tracks” listings. Ok?

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Today Yahoo released an intriguing service called “Pipes”. Based on the concept of unix pipes, it allows you to filter and process RSS feed data in a chain - using a very cool web graphical user interface. The result can be spit out in a variety of formats that can then be used in your RSS reader, on your blog, in a Greasemonkey script or even as the building blocks of more complex pipes.

There is still a lot of room for improvement on the tool (the wish list of functionality grows by the second!) but it’s an awesome and inspiring start. The only major complaint from people is the lack of easy-to-understand documentation. Don’t worry though - I’ll present a step-by-step guide to get you going!

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