Consultations.

And, in a break from the (currently) personal projects, here's one that there's actual money in! I'm helping to upgrade my previous company from the Adobe Creative Suite 2 to the current version 5, which involves a whole load of bits and pieces, but one in particular is the updating of the scripts that I wrote to automatically import images into InDesign.

InDesign is a page layout application with a number of advantages.
- it is (relatively) cheap
- it is very powerful
- it has excellent integration with Adobe's other products (particularly PhotoShop and Illustrator)
- it has marvellous scripting support that lets you write scripts to make life just that little bit easier.

It's actually the inspiration behind my first ploddings into JavaScript - I had becoe tired of importing hundreds of images into a book, and decided that it would be much more efficient to have a script do it for me. With a little experimentation, I managed to knock something together that just about worked, and from then on I never really looked back.

So now I get to look back on my handiwork of several years ago with a newly-qualified and practiced eye, and think: "Good grief. Did I really think that this was sophisticated? Yikes!"

I mean, really. In answer to the question "How do I check if a number is odd or even?", I had used the solution: divide by two, convert to string, and search for ".5" within the string. Bad form, old chap, bad form indeed.

So I'm really rather looking forward to rewriting these, both from an efficiency standpoint and to try and make them that much more featured. Obviously, progress will be noted here (where else) as well as what I'm learning.

So far, what I've learned is that the scripting features in the later versions of the CS are massively more advanced that the ones that I was originally using. For a start, it has a complete package for helping to write scripts (though I'm not actually finding it as useful as, say, Eclipse).

Fascinating article: Everything you need to know about the internet

A brilliant article here on the Guardian's website is an excellent summary of quite a few interesting bits and pieces. Most useful is the fairly simple differentiation between the Internet and the World Wide Web. (I wish I'd had that example in my recent exams!)

I'd be very interested to see the book that's coming from this. I'll have to keep and eye on John Naughton's updates to find out when it's coming out.

7th Sea roller; chapter 2

I said in an earlier post that I was planning on writing a dice-roller application for 7th Sea, and that screenshots of the initial interface would follow soon.

Well, here they are!

They're not exactly complete yet, but this should give an example of the overall layout that I'm aiming for. Colours and actual appearance is going to change at some point, after I get a bit of user feedback.

Experimental Ajax, episode 1

The first Ajax-based page is now up and running! Marvellous.

It's a skill-picker for a series of rpg events run in the UK, and this is designed to extend the booking system written by a good friend. Instead of merely typing in a list of the skills that a character has, this script lets a user type in a few characters from the skill's name, and the server then returns suggestions of the skill that was intended.

In a nutshell, this is Google Suggest done all over again. But by me. ;)

Currently the system generates and refreshes a list of buttons with the skill names on, and adds any skills clicked on to a list. (Edit: and now looks just a little bit more professional, keeps easy track of how many selections you've made, and clears the text and suggestions whenever you add a new skill to the list.)

Next elements of the project will include database interactivity: i.e.: it'll pull the information out from a database, and use that to generate help pages on the fly.

The page can currently be found at this location.

Actually up and running!

With a couple of spare hours, I've actually published my "professional" homepage and sorted out a few more of the niggling CSS issues. And beaten the file permissions on the server into shape.

What more could people possibly want? Content? Nah, it's overrated, surely?

Well, that's what's coming next - a few pages to explain the various projects rather than just linking directly to them, and perhaps a continuation of the development of the RSS reader.

With any luck, I'll also be getting database functionality on the server pretty soon, so then there can be plenty of extra features enabled, too.

7th Sea roller

I'm going to be starting a new roleplaying game up in the near-ish future, and I'd like to try and develop some kind of dice-roller to speed up the game, and take away a little bit of the slow dice-rolling that can go on.

RandomRolly isn't quite up to the job - we're playing face-to-face round a table, rather than on Wave, so it's going to have to be a project from scratch.

Ideally, I'd like it to be accessible over web-enabled phones, so that players can use it on them - if they want. Which means it's got to be pretty simplistic, and also universal.

Currently I'm leaning towards a simple web page to start with, probably powered with JavaScript. After that I might aim for a Java application (and then an applet) that I could host somewhere. If all of those work and I'm still feeling ambitious, I might even end up trying to create a full-on Android app (though that would mainly be to see if I could!).

Thoughts:
- I'd like this to be both flexible and expandable, so I'm going to try and really use the object orientation lessons that were drummed into us.
- I'd also like it to be quite user-friendly, so there'll be lessons from the HCI side of things showing up here as well.

Plans:
- First of all there'll be a few screenshots for the interface going up.
- Then, we start planning the data types and overall structure of the app.

More news as it comes...

RandomRolly update

RandomRolly is still going strong: I dusted him off today to have a quick fiddle around with some of the settings.

In particular, I'm looking at the DocumentChangedEvent settings, and how to filter them so that they're only fired when a user actually completes one of the dice commands.

How hard can it be? (part 2)

Answer: not all that hard - mostly!

The feed is working quite nicely, opening up an xml file saved from the feed, reading out what I want it to read out, and outputting it as pleasantly formatted HTML. Fantastic.

Now all I need to do is to figure out how to get it to read the XML file on the server itself. That's proving tricky, and I'm not sure why: the links I'm creating to the file just don't seem to work.

(Edit: as I suspected - it's because the script to get the XML file is hosted on a different server to the one that I'm trying to pull the RSS feed from, so it's a security issue. Hmm.)

(Further edit: and the webserver that I'm using doesn't like using PHP to access files not stored on that server. Trickier & tricker. One solution would be to figure out a way of caching the feed file each evening, so that I could just read from that file instead; but I'm not quite sure how to approach that. Will require further thought, apparently.)

More news later.

How hard can it be?

One of the things that I'd quite like to include on this proposed homepage of professional(-ish!) stuff is an RSS feed from this and possibly other blogs. Obviously, there are tools out there to make that easy (Feed2JS being one of them, and the one that I'm using at the moment).

But I quite like to know exactly what's going on under the hood in these things, so I'm going to have a quick go at putting together a home-grown version of it. How hard can it be, right? I get an XML file (the feed itself) and parse it. There have to be a thousand and five ways of doing that!

Optimism. What a fantastic feeling!

Baby steps

The first draft of my planned "professional" home page is just about up and running. It's not much at the moment: just a page with my name, contact details, and an RSS feed from this blog, but it's a start.

The next step is to try and write my own XML parsing code for pulling in an RSS feed, rather than relying on someone else's!

Happy coding :-)