Archive for category web
Top 2009 Facebook Status Trends
Posted by Howard Yeend in web on December 22nd, 2009
As google release their annual zeitgeist, and many other sites prepare interesting stats on web usage, facebook have today done the same and released an fascinating insight into the top facebook status update topics of 2009:
Facebook Chat Smilies
Posted by Howard Yeend in web on December 3rd, 2009
After the runaway success of my facebook chat history video (45k views, 100 ratings on youtube) I thought I’d follow up with a video explaining all the chat emotes you can use in facebook. There are some cool emoticons there.
Read the rest of this entry »
GIFexplode – community powered web development
Posted by Howard Yeend in PHP, web on August 2nd, 2009
Let me share with you a very cool story about strangers coming together and building something.
I was browsing reddit yesterday, and I saw a thread entitled “Someone needs to make a Firefox add-on that lets you step through animated gifs frame by frame“. I thought “hey that’s a nice well defined simple idea” – just the kind of thing I love, so I registered a nice-sounding domain name and started looking at how to use PHP to split an animated gif into its component frames – I figured it couldn’t be too hard. Read the rest of this entry »
Facebook Chat History
Posted by Howard Yeend in Productivity, hacking, web on July 24th, 2009
A little video I made with some instructions on how to get facebook chat history, even if your friends are offline.
It’s always really annoying when you remember that a friend sent you a cool link but they’re not online any more. With this facebook tweak you can bring up the chat history.
Facebook only stores chat history for a few days though, so there might be no history to retrieve.
This is an extension of my facebook hacks page.
PS: Sorry the text is so small on the vid, put it fullscreen and you can read it better :0)
Adaptive Web Sites
Posted by Howard Yeend in Adaptive Web Sites, web on June 14th, 2009
(this is a slightly expanded transcript of a talk I gave at Oxford in June 2009 about my work there)
Hi! I’m Howard Yeend, my supervisor is Vasile Palade, and the title of my project is:
“Implementing Adaptive Web Sites using Machine Learning and Ajax“.
But before I talk about what all those buzzwords mean, I’d like to give a little background information about why this is an important research area, and why I feel it’s the right project for me.
When I was trying to think of a project title, I had a question in mind:
How can we improve the web?
And I think that’s a hugely important question for us to ask.
Facebook Username Vanity URLs
Posted by Howard Yeend in web on June 10th, 2009
This has been brewing for quite a few days now, but when you next log in to facebook you’ll see that it’s official: We’re going to get usernames:
Backup your files in the cloud with Dropbox
Posted by Howard Yeend in Productivity, Programs, web on May 29th, 2009
How does 2 gig of free online storage sound? Well you can with this really sweet application! I’ve been using it for 6 months and it’s just great to be able to “set it and forget”; once a file is in my dropbox I know I can blow up my PC and still have full backups. That’s a good feelin’ :0)
Prevent RSI with WorkRave
Posted by Howard Yeend in Productivity, Programs, web on May 22nd, 2009
harness the healing power of sheep with Workrave
For the last few months, I’ve been using workrave on my windows machine to remind me to take regular breaks.
I know we’ve all seen similar software floating about the net for years, and like me you probably thought “oh cool, I’ll use that some day”. Well make today that day!
Honestly, it’s just a really nifty little app. Admittedly, most of the time I just hit “skip break” instead of actually taking the 30 second micro-break it suggests, but it’s there as a reminder that I should be taking breaks.
Hacking Facebook
Posted by Howard Yeend in Other Code, Productivity, hacking, javascript, web on May 8th, 2009
Hacking Facebook with Javascript
now updated for the latest (March 2010) version of facebook!
Because facebook relies so heavily on javascript, and because we can type javascript into the address bar, that means we can “poke” into the workings of facebook to do things that we wouldn’t normally be able to do. It’s not “hacking” exactly, but it employs the same sort of skills hackers use when looking into applications. The best part is that because it’s all using the same control codes (or “API”) that facebook uses, there’s no way for facebook to find out you’re doing it, so it’s totally safe! (I think…) Besides, we’re not going to be doing anything too dodgy, just a few little tweaks ;)