h4x   The useless ramblings of a web developer.

At the end of 2011 I made a decision to progress my professional career. I decided to end my time as a web developer at Dennis Publishing and took on a new role at Anobii.

Anobii is a relatively young start up based in London which aims to create a social discovery platform for books. The theory is that we decide what to read by getting recommendations from people we trust. This is certainly true for me as Harry put me on to the George R. R. Martin books I am currently working my way through. Previously though I have relied on Joe to point me in the right direction.

I have joined the API team which will be developing the services powering the new website and apps. Eventually the API will be public facing to allow thirdparties to do exciting things with our data.

If you’re interested in finding out more please take a moment to check out the new website beta.anobii.com and the original at www.anobii.com.

Just a quick note to say that we have launched the bit-tech blog.

It’s been custom written for the site and is quite neatly tied into the CMS and overall site.

After updating rails from 2.0.2 to 2.2.2 on the bit-tech CMS this week I discovered a bug that had cropped up in one of my controllers where I was calling zip to join a a has_many collection with a couple of arrays and iterate through them. The code that was working fine now did something like the following.

>> g.groups.zip([1,2], [3,4]) {|a,b,c| p a.inspect + ‘, ‘ + b.inspect + ‘, ‘ + c.inspect }
“[#<Group id: 1>, 1, 3], nil, nil”
“[#<Group id: 2>, 2, 4], nil, nil”

This is strange, I can no longer access the three elements of the array directly in the block. So I tried the following

>> g.groups.to_a.zip([1,2], [3,4]) {|a,b,c| p a.inspect + ‘, ‘ + b.inspect + ‘, ‘ + c.inspect }
“#<Group id: 1>, 1, 3″
“#<Group id: 2>, 2, 4″

As you can see this solved the problem, but I was confused why there was a difference so I executed…

>> g.groups.class
=> Array

Why when I cast it to an Array, from an Array, is it acting differently? Rails must have done something to the Array class that is returned by the has_many relationship.

Well that didn’t even get off the ground.

I’m now busy trying get more airtime on my mountain bike.

For a long time I’ve wanted to sit down and code a game but until now I’ve never really taken the time to learn anything about it and I’ve never had a good idea for a game. Joe has recently put together a concept for a game called Pacifist and since I’m quite keen to learn the process of creating games I’ve volunteered myself to help with the programming. A team of forum members have decided to use Microsoft’s XNA Framework to build the game which suites me since I’m much more fluent with C# than C++.

I just hope it’ll get off the ground!

The path of optimised code can lead in the opposite direction to that of reusable code.

Google has now updated and bit is now being indexed on google.co.uk (pages from the UK) despite being hosted in the United States. It remains to see whether this increases the percentage of UK readers on the website, but logic dictates that it should.

For a while now we’ve been banging about the office the problem of getting our website listed on google.co.uk with the ‘pages from the uk’ option ticked. The rough aim is to increase the UK traffic to www.bit-tech.net. So we bit the bullet last friday and switched the geographic target to United Kingdom in Google webmaster tools. Results will follow…  

I previously posted that I was working on bit’s new price comparison website and I can now report that it’s ready for you to use to track down the best prices.

Price comparison seems to be a popular web exercise these days. There are so many people doing it that you almost can’t google a product name without seeing at least 5 different comparison sites.

At bit-tech.net we are no different, we have our own price comparison site built from the PriceGrabber API.

I am currently overhauling the code and look and feel of the site since it looks like ass. Stay tuned for the news when it’s released later this month.