As an early adopter of online applications (social or other) I couldn’t wait to get my hand on Google Buzz. About 2 days into playing with it, I did what a lot of other people did, I switched it off and the reason for this was simply that it was too much clutter. I already use Facebook and Twitter and suddenly I had yet another channel I had to update.

If your read this blog on a regular basis you will know that I co-run a small local competition listing site called winthis.co.za and after Buzz came out I thought that even if I’m not going to use it I’m sure that many people will. So I started doing research about how to implement a “Buzz this” button on the site. Google had little to no information about the implementation of a button like this so I had to start reading up on the service. Before I knew it I was way beyond the implementation of a link and was almost consumed by a much bigger picture.

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“Music is an immediate art; it’s always happening right now…” – Sam Andrew

So it’s been a while since I posted on my blog, there are a number of reasons for this, but I think the most prominent one must be that I was too busy coding pure awesomeness!

Last year I started something where I listed my top 10 CD’s for 2008 and I thought I will be a cool exercise to do it again this year and just like last year let me just start by saying that the 10 CD’s in this list isn’t necessarily from 2009. Just because it was new to me doesn’t mean it was new to anyone else.

So in no particular order, here they are:
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This is why I like working for Stonewall+..

To get the ball rolling on the Vodacom FAME site, we decided to make a video and upload it to the site. I got a day for shooting and about another day for editing it down to something watchable.

All I can say is that the response is quite overwhelming. Over 3000 people have watched me shake my ass lol!

Check it out here!

Update: The campaign is now over and the videos was taken down too, so the above link doesn’t work anymore

It was a few months ago that me and my buddy Clement came up with the idea of building a site that could list all the local online competitions. He was going to do the design and I was going to do the coding.

Initially I thought that I was going to build the whole thing on Wordpress, but after some consideration we decided to build a custom system that would cater specifically to our needs. Lucky for me I had a basic skeleton already (which I customized for ScientificFeed) and the building started.

This is now a fully operational back-end that allows us to upload pictures for the various competitions and also to specify if a competition should be featured at the top of the site or not. It also have a fully integrated mailing list sign up system and messaging system.

In addition to all that I also coded it to export a RSS feed for the site to allow people to follow the site from a reader of their choice.

Check out the WinThis site!

ScientificFeed.com is some sort of a landmark project for me. Its the 1st time that I did a whole site start to end where PHP was involved. (I’m currently still learning PHP and this was my 1st learning project) I came up with the idea, then designed the site, then coded the front-end (HTML/CSS/JS) and then coded all of the PHP for it.

The idea was simple. I would build a widget that people can put it on their site or blog and reach their visitors with fresh facts on every visit… while educating them in a fun way about science.

The facts are split into 6 categories (animals, plants, technology, space, medical and the human body). This is to make sure that you don’t force your visitors to read about tape worms on you astronomy site. The single view of a fact will also show you 3 related facts from the same category, for further browsing.

The site is sporting a custom back end that allows me to add/remove facts, track widget usage and check messages that was sent from the site’s contact form.

Check out the ScientificFeed site! (and maybe sign up for a widget too!)