New website

I’ve finally fixed the website, from that file I
deleted. True it wouldn’t of required
that much effort to fix but I thought I’d give the site a re-code/design while I was at it
- I seem to have a habit of that but anyhow since I’ve improved on my Rails skills since the last code this build went much smoother which leads nicely into the next change. The layout.

I’m
sure you have noticed the new layout but I bet you did know that it in
fact changes between a night theme and a day theme at 6AM or 6PM….
but if you prefer one theme over the other why not click one of those
little icons in the top right? They change the theme to whatever one
you choose for that session (while the browser is open) you can even
switch back to the time based theme if you prefer that.

You’ll also notice the flickr, twitter and last.fm
integration on the right of the page. Apart from twitter they are all pulled in from an RSS feed and then using fragment caching with memcache in rails to do
some time based caching so the flickr feed is updated every hour and the last.fm one every 5 minutes. I will talk more about how I did this in a later post.

The twitter feed is updated/imported using their javascript code so that should be real time. Oh and about twitter I’ve finally decided I’d get one after months of thinking hmmm is there much point in telling people what I’m doing all the time? Well I thought meh why not? People don’t have to read it and its something all the ‘cool’ kids are doing.

Holiday

So for the past two week I’ve had some time off work and was lucky enough to spend 5 days in Edinburgh and 3 days in London with my girl friend (Kerry). Both trips went smoothly and a I thoroughly enjoyed both (I even enjoyed London :o).

Edinburgh is both amazing and beautiful me and Kerry had a fantastic time here looking around both the city, art galleries and museums of which there are lots! We took a Flybe flight up to Edinburgh from Birmingham on a small plane which was nice. When we arrived in Edinburgh they had a very handy and excellent bus service from the airport which took us all the way into the centre, the buses run every 10 minutes - I really did think this was excellent. We stopped in the Royal Garden Apartments which was a very nice apartment. The apartment was but 5 minute walk from Prince’s Street and any shops we needed also being close to most of the attractions. Oh and the national portrait gallery was right opposite the apartment so of course we went there first =) (left image was view from the window).

On the second day we went to Edinburgh castle, although I’d been before I was quite young so I only remembered bits so going again was a very fun day out, it also meant I got to take lots of pictures and blend in with all the cute Japanese tourists taking all their pictures. The castle was quite busy as you expect though there were a lot of school trips there with all these Scottish kids, I love the Scottish accent its cute.

On the third day we decided to visit all the galleries - national, modern, etc… these were spread all over the city so it took all day to get around. They were quite interesting but I’m sure Kerry enjoyed/appreciated them more so than I.

On the fourth day we went to the Museum of Scotland and the Royal Museum, which are attached, these were both very interesting and fun :), while being quite big and hard to navigate around at the same time.

The 3 days we spent in London were very fun too, again we visited the art gallery and the natural history museum which were both very big and full of interesting paintings and animals the real excitement of course for me was the science museum getting to play with all the interactive stuff like a little child, amazing amounts fun indeed. Although we did get evacuated from the building for some reason, and I’d love to know why lucky for us though we were in the last room.

The tube was not to bad at all, we found our way around with ease and although it got a little busy now and then majority of the time it was pretty empty. Also for some strange reason unbeknown to me I like the smell at the tube station, must be all that unclean air plus the tube kinda reminds me of the 60’s, maybe its because the icon looks all retro.

So all in all the holiday’s went very well and I enjoyed both lots and lots, although going back to work was a shock to the system.