Steve Rogers

Welcome to my personal web site powered by Drupal the open source content management system . You will find various articles, opinions and information on subjects including Drupal, Adobe Flex, PHP and other related technologies.

Above is MagONE+ a configurable Slideshow viewer for any public Smugmug album. To read more about it and to use it on your own web site or blog with your Smugmug album just see here for more details.

I have just finished the initial creation of an application to monitor my Twitter account for new updates. I already use the GMAIL Notifier app to keep an eye on my gmail account for new messages so I decided to write a similar application to notify me of new updates to my Twitter time line, and so far it's been very useful in letting me know when I get updates so I then only have to check Twitter when I need to.

If you want to give it a go then you can download it from here http://tinyurl.com/cq2e4x (I used TwitterPipe to post it as a Twitter update).

I have just finished putting together the first beta release of a new service I have been working on called TwitterPipe.

TwitterPipe gives you the ability to attach any type of file and add it to a Twitter update so that you can share it with your Twitter friends. It not only allows you to share photos but videos, pdf files, spreadsheets, in fact any document you have on your computer.

As well as the web interface the service has a REST API available. This allows third-party applications to access the service provided by TwitterPipe.

To demo the API I have created an Adobe AIR application that allows you to login and upload files from your desktop, this is also available on the site.

So my next endeavour is to look at Android and developing apps, so I decided as I have been using Google Maps in PHP, Flex (AS3) etc it would be logical to look at Maps in Android, simple huh ?

Not at all, I tried (numerous) to follow the Map View tutorial but although it all seemed to work OK, I never got a map to display in the emulator ( and each time I re-checked the debug key/api key as well). So after trawling the net and finding a lot of others had the same problem I came across an article here. After reading through this I noticed that the manifest file had some extra "bits" put in, specifically some permissions:

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET"></uses-permission>
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION"></uses-permission>

Once I had added these - MY MAP APPEARED!!!, so this is in case the info is any help to anyone else - and thanks to the article mentioned above.

I have now updated Tweedar and created a small "widget" version of the application, it also has a home of its own now @ www.tweedar.com.

I have just uploaded the first version of my Twitter Tweet RADAR (TWEEDAR). You can read more about it at http://www.sbrogers.com/consultancy/node/4, but basically it allows you to select any point in the world using a Google interactive map and then see what people are "Tweeting" about within a given radius that you can set. So it acts like a RADAR for public Tweets from the location that you set up, a MUST for all you conversation voyeurs out that - looking into someone's life anywhere in the world.

I have been looking into creating some form of calendar/scheduling module for Drupal using the Google Calendar. I have started by generating a module that displays a daily, weekly and monthly schedule based on the entries in the calendar. To do this I have used the Zend GDATA API's for Google to access and extract the calendar data.

I now have a demo version up and running which can be found at http://www.sbrogers.com/consultancy/ which is a Drupal 6 site I have set up to test the module.

Doing the development locally is fine ( I use XAMPP) and therefore I can change the php include path to suit what I need, but to be able to host the Zend Framework (it contains the GDATA API's) on an external site is another matter. But, as usual, the ISP I now host my new sites with came good AGAIN. I emailed them with what I needed and how it should be set up and they did a great job of enabling the Zend framework for me , so a big thank you to ImageLeet (and their support guys) for sorting my query yet again.

A screenshot of the weekly schedule can be seen here. It uses jquery to open and close the schedule item when the item title is clicked. The screen shot shows one of the schedule items open with the others shut.

Just got emailed a link from Adobe http://www.adobeairflip.co.uk/. Great game written in Flex and using the AIR runtime.

I have just looked at the statistics for the installation and use of my Smugmug slideshow widget "magONE" and I would just like to thank everyone for the comments I have recieved and the positive feedback I have had so far.

From Mar 08 when it was first released:

• To date the number of recorded installs: 100+
• The total number of impressions: 27,000+

And these are only from installations that have used the widget install tool , they do not include any custom code installations.

Iv'e just finished generating a Facebook application started over the weekend to see what was involved. So I have created an app called SkyBlue Cliches it allows you to vote for (and adding your own) favorite business cliches and metaphors, keeping a league table of the top 5 most popular that you can add to your profile

Quite fun to put together, a lot of "what happens if I do this" with the Facebook API and FBML, but altogether it seems to function as I had planned. If you want to take a look then it can be found here http://apps.facebook.com/cliches.