Blog

The ImAFish Forum has seen its best month since May 2006 in what's been hailed as an epic revival. It was only five months ago in February that the Forum had its worst month ever.

The Forum Posts Per Month graph can be found on ImAFish Reports. The data goes all the way back from when the forum was founded in 2002. I've tried to see if there are any patterns in posting habits however there are no clear trends.

May seems a particularly good month throughout the years, this could be put down to it being exam time meaning members were looking for more ways to procrastinate however considering most members have full time jobs now this no longer applies.

Posting figures had been stabilising until about a year ago when the number of posters decreased, this dip lasted about 10 months until June when activity started to pick up again.

The number of posts per month on the forum is far from the early days in 2002 and 2003 

I've been using Twitter for a couple of months now, it's a mostly pointless service that I keep going back to. Some days I can think of lots to write but most days I can't think of anything. I think I'm trying too hard to post something useful or interesting rather than just something random.

I'm following a number of people now, some of them post generally interesting stuff thats happening others post crap. 

I'm interested to know what other people use Twitter for and what they get from posting stuff on there? (The same can be said for Facebook status updates).

It's been a year in the coming but finally I have an iPhone. I managed to find one at a reasonable price and have unlocked it to use T-Mobile (so I don't need a new contract with O2).

I've been wary of smart phones since I had bad experiences with the MDA Vario, it wasn't that it was a bad phone hardware wise, it was the laggy software that let it down. I recently had the chance to play with a HTC Diamond whilst setting it up for a client, it has the stylish looks but again the Windows Mobile software let it down. The lag was still there when you tapped the screen (often twice or three times) and having to use the pen every time you wanted to use the phone was another annoyance.

Fortunately the iPhone makes up from where the other smart phones are let down. The phone itself looks great with a big scratch resistant screen. The software works well and when you press a button (with your finger) it works instantly.

Unlocking was very easy, much easier than with a Nokia or Sony Ericsson, you just download an application called ZiPhone and click 'Do it all', this upgrades/downgrades the firmware, activates and unlocks the phone.

It also installs Jailbreak which allows you to install third party applications and games. I installed a useful one that automatically uploads pictures to Flickr when you take them on the camera.I was expecting it to be slow to type on the iPhone but the speed is very similar to other phones.

If you can pick up a second hand iPhone then I would recommend unlocking it as its so easy to do!

Piclens is a plugin for Firefox that allows you to browse pictures in a fullscreen 3D envionment. It's 3D wall interface (pictured below) makes it effortless to browse thousands of photos quickly and easily.

Once you find a picture you like, a single click shows an enlarged version with any available description.

Sites have to be enabled to use Piclens however sites such as Flickr and some news sites have the ability to use it.

PicLens works on:

* YouTube
* Flickr
* Facebook
* MySpace
* Google Images
* Photobucket
* DeviantArt
* Picasa Web Albums
* Smugmug
* FotoTime
* Fotki
* Bebo Hi5
* Friendster
* Yahoo Image Search
* Ask Image Search
* Live Image Search
* AOL Image Search

 You can download the plugin from the Firefox Addons site.

I work with the open source content management system Drupal on a daily basis, I've designed sites for local and international organisations. Modules are essential for my work, these are the ones I work with everyday and use in some fashion on almost every website.

1. CCK - Content Construction Kit

Almost every website will need to define content fields in some way so that it is easy for the user to enter data and to report off, the CCK module gives you this flexibility to do this. These can be anything from simple number and text fields to select boxes, radio buttons and image upload fields. CCK is one of the main reasons Drupal is a flexible platform allowing for the quick development of website.

More:www.drupal.org/project/cck

2. Views

Being able to store all your data is great however what really matters is how you display this data to the end user. By being able to select what fields you want to display, pass arguments and setup filters, Views is incredibly powerful and goes hand in hand with CCK.

More: www.drupal.org/project/views

3. Panels

Panels is a great way to mix different views and blocks into the same page in different columns. The panels module comes with either two or three column layouts giving some great flexibiltiy to page design.

More: www.drupal.org/project/panels

4. Pathauto

Clean URL's are a great way to give a more descriptive URL, the path auto module allows you to automatically generate different urls for different types of content. For example on ImAFish it differentiates imafish.co.uk/blog/??? and imafish.co.uk/articles/??? .

More: www.drupal.org/project/pathauto

5. TinyMCE

TinyMCE integrates a Javascript WYSIWYG editor into Drupal providing an easy way to add formatting to pages. It doesn't matter about the type of site I'm building, the client always needs a way to easily edit a pages content. TinyMCE makes this goal possible, I don't think there has been a Drupal site to date where I haven't integrated TinyMCE in.

More: www.drupal.org/project/tinymce

6. IMCE

IMCE integrates an image upload box into TinyMCE and provides basic controls for resizing images. IMCE is here for a similar reason that TinyMCE is, people love to put pictures on web pages and usually these start out on a users computer. IMCE provides an easy way to upload these images so that they can be positioned on a page with TinyMCE.

More: www.drupal.org/project/imce

7.  Captcha

Spam submissions plague the Internet, and the captcha module nicely integrates with registration, login, commenting and a number of other fields to help stop spammers. The captcha comes in two forms, either letters or a simple mathmatical equation.

More: www.drupal.org/project/captcha

8. Token

Token makes a number of place holders available to other modules allowing you to easily build up strings to be used to buid arguments.

More: www.drupal.org/project/token

9. XMLSitemap

The XMLSitemap module automatically generates and submits sitemaps to a number of search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN. A great module to help with search engine optimization. 

More: www.drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap

10. Google Analytics

The Analytics module is a simple one that just gives you the ability to add Googles visitor tracking software to your site.

More: www.drupal.org/project/google_analytics

I've just added a life feed to ImAFish, it syndicates everything I do on Digg, Flickr, Twitter and ImAFish.

To get your own Life Feed on ImAFish there are instructions on the forum.

Has anyone else played around with life feeds - does anyone use them?

Today I took part in the Shrewsbury Dragon Boat Race to help raise money for Shrewsbury Hospice. Our team made up of 17 people from our office (The Pump House), the majority representing Marches Energy Agency, I represented Information Solutions (and obviously world famous ImAFish).

Click on any picture to see a larger version on Flickr.

The boat we had to race.

The team lining up the boat. We are all dressed as superheroes (under our life jackets).

Much love to Jonnie (also representing ImAFish) for coming in at last minute to fill the team. You can see my superhero mask on my head.

Everyone was nervous that we might fall in.

Jo, Tessa, Sarah and Jeremy.

A discussion on climate change (I guess).

View the complete set on Flickr.

Much love to Laura for taking the photos.

It's been a while since I've updated Comment Luv for Drupal and I've had a number of requests for a update for Drupal 6.

I've been talking to Andy from FiddyP who's updated his version for Wordpress recently and I hope to have an updated version of Comment Luv within the coming weeks. I've not used Drupal 6 much yet so this will be a good chance to learn some of the updates, I had been waiting for the CCK and Views modules to come out of beta before starting any work on Drupal 6 (I've not used it on any production sites at work yet either).

 I know there are a fair number of sites out there using Comment Luv which is great.

After one of my recent rants I used an image of Gordon Ramsay saying 'Done'. I received a number of comments saying how funny it was and how it would make a great Internet meme so I've put together an image generator that lets you create your own Gordon Ramsay sayings!

Once your happy with your image right click it, select save as and change the extension to .png, you can then use it anywhere on the web.

Note: If your reading this through the RSS feed or Facebook you will need to visit the post on ImAFish.

Much love for Terri Ann and her writing text to images with php tutorial which was 99% of the work DONE.

With all the hype over the new 3G iPhone as announced by Apple last week that we have a new website launching today dedicated to videos of the iPhone.

www.iphonevideos.net

The site is constantly updated with the latest videos of iPhones, iPhone tutorials, iPhone unlocking and iPhone Adverts.