So, the total cinema visit count for this year was only 94 (down from last years 100+), but still a respectable amount. It was also the year we finally bothered to get Cineworld Unlimited cards, saving a small fortune! Anyway, here are my top 10 films of 2011. Continue reading »

The title may be a bit of a mouthful, but it explains the purpose of this post. Similar to my previous post, this guide serves as a reference for myself but I figured others might also find it useful. Continue reading »

I love my little Linode (shameless referral link), running several sites on the smallest instance available which gives just 512Mb of memory. With the popularity of HL Twitter and Plex Export, I pretty often max out the available memory and Apache starts dropping requests. So I recently set about looking at the best way to reduce my memory footprint and settled on dropping Nginx in front of Apache. This guide explains how and why. Continue reading »

Within the world of web applications, and much more relevantly within PHP, there is an abundant choice of frameworks available for use. It almost goes without saying that any project begun nowadays has at its foundation some form of framework, if only to remove the tedious repetition every project involves (requests, routes, database, caching etc). Within this world of frameworks though, two groups continually push to create new frameworks. Continue reading »

Since my last post on HL Twitter almost a month ago, I’ve accrued another 3,000 downloads bringing my total to just over 8,000. Now obviously this doesn’t mean 8,000 people are using my plugin, undoubtedly many of them are repeat downloads etc. But it does mean I now have a much larger userbase compared to my initial development, and with that comes “support requests”. Continue reading »

It’s always good when geeks get together. Well for geeks at least, most people’s eyes just glaze over at the first mention of programming. As such this is a quick bloggie to let all the web devs in the Brum area know about HydraHack, an informal meetup arranged by Tom Martin (a colleague at 383).

HydraHack is a monthly meetup for web developers in Birmingham, who enjoy getting together and making things.

Come along, show off your latest creation and have a few cuppas at Urban Coffee Co.

My first WordPress plugin, HL Twitter, was released six months ago and at the time of writing is just a few downloads under 5,000. So it was about time it got some much needed love! Continue reading »

Last week I was annoyed; I had passed 20,000 tweets on Twitter (@Dachande663) and didn’t realise until I was almost a hundred over. So, with a bit of prompting from @Si, I set about to make a really simple, highly focused app to remind you when you’re about to pass Twitter milestones. Introducing MyTweetCount Continue reading »

Any developer should be using some form of source control, I’ve written about this before. My current preference for hosting code is Beanstalk and while their website is very well built it’s just not made for mobile use. Enter Magic Bean. Continue reading »

2010. It’s being an absolutely amazing year personally and I’m sad to see it end, but as ever time marches on. This post serves to sum up everything I’ve done this year and what I’m looking forward to in 2011. Continue reading »