With a few projects coming to an end it turns out I have some time on my hands that I could do with filling with some paying work. I’m an experienced web developer, having been building sites and applications for eleven or twelve years now. I prefer to work with Ruby on Rails, and have been doing so for two years, but am comfortable in a range of environments and want my tools to match the project as well as possible. I frequently find myself working with drupal, and as an eight-year PHP veteran, that’s okay.

I’m particularly passionate about helping charities, music organisations, and magazine publishers make use of the web as effectively as possible. I can help such organisations work out how what they do in other environments translates to the web, and then to build the tools to make that happen. I prefer nuance to buzzwords, but I can throw around the appropriate Web 2.0 terms if I have to.

(and if you don’t fit in that list but have a project you think I might find interesting, I’m still interested in hearing from you)

I’m used to working solo, or in a small team, and have experience of leading teams as well as being a member. I’d prefer something in or around London, but usually work from home and am quite open to remote working.

I’ve got three, or maybe four days available for the next couple of months. You can reach me at james@jystewart.net to find out more.

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I am not a visual designer. That’s a statement that’s probably obvious to anyone who’s spent much time on one of the sites for which I am solely responsible. Thankfully I have numerous friends and colleagues who are designers and thanks to them there are a number of projects which have come out looking good.

For a long time I’ve been wanting to redesign this site. To give it more presence, to make it a bit friendlier, but mainly to make it neater. I’ve had numerous ideas, but always lacked either the time or the skill to make them a reality. But today, finally, I have at least achieved the third of my aims. It’s all thanks to the CSS framework of the moment, blueprint, and a little free time to work on it.

I’m not really a fan of the various toolkits for grid-based design. I don’t like presentation-focussed class names cluttering my HTML. But they do help in getting a clean design out the door quickly, and so I’ve conceded in this case to use blueprint and hope that the microformats included alongside it redeem the use of class names like ‘column’ and ’span-10′.

If I had still more time I’d like to write a parser that will use those class names as a base and generate stylesheets that apply the same styling to the more appropriate class names the HTML already holds. But I don’t, so for now, things are as they are. Please let me know if you spot any glitches—I’m sure there are some I’ve yet to spot—and hopefully the new design will make this site a little easier to follow.

Next I need to take the blog’s look and apply it across the rest of the site.

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For a while now I’ve been wanting to set up one of those fancy del.icio.us posting things, whereby links I’ve added to my account during the day get posted to this blog each evening. But I use my del.icio.us account for a lot more than just topics that are covered here, and I don’t want to clutter it up. Nor did I want to have to switch between accounts to specify which links get posted where.

So I was very pleased to discover (via Simon Willison, and a twitter post from Drew) Nat Downe’s snafflr script, which will check a specified list of delicious accounts and post links with a certain tag to another account. And so it is that so long as I tag items correctly, a cron job will find the links I want to add to this blog, and once a day they’ll be posted for me using delicious’ own blogging support.

We’ll see in a few hours whether it’s worked!

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Now that everything is off the old servers, it seemed a good time to reassess my spam filtering. This blog is run using Wordpress and so far it’s been relatively spam-free, but some referrer spam has begun to leak into my logs and a few inappropriate comments and trackbacks have appeared lately. My other blog is one of a number I host using MovableType and they (probably in large part because of their good google rankings) tend to get inundated with comment and trackback spam.

Up until now I had been using MT-Blacklist to filter incoming comments and that has done a great job, stopping over 20,000 comment spams in the past few months. But too many have still been leaking through and now that I’m responsible for my own server configuration my concern to keep load down has increased. So I’ve set up mod_security and used blacklist_to_modsec to convert my blacklist to a general filter list that’s applied server-wide.

Behind that, MT-Blacklist remains in place and will stay there until the next beta of SpamLookup appears. I’ve heard nothing but praise for SpamLookup and was planning to install it last night, but noting that the second beta was withdrawn I thought I might as well wait for the next one. We’ll see how long that takes…

Most of the installation was straightforward. It’s nice to be back to using debian, and the only problem it gave me was due to the fact that I had installed PHP5 from source and therefore didn’t have a ‘.info’ file for it. It didn’t take long to roll one that stopped the errors. I also saw errors when trying to get blacklist up and running on the new machine, in particular:

Storable binary image v2.7 more recent than I am

This thread helped me get a better idea of what was causing the error, but not much of how to solve it. In the end I reinitialized the blacklist, and all was well.

I sincerely doubt that this is the last I’ll see of comment spam, but hopefully there’ll be a lot less from now on, and perhaps there’ll finally be a reduction in the referrer spam that’s been wrecking my logs of late.

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Discussion of ‘the Semantic Web’ and ‘Web Services’ rarely dies down, but it seems like there’s been more than usual of late. As analysts yet again predict that this year will the “The Year of Web Services” more people are beginning to agree that such hype isn’t making any real impact on the use of service-based architectures.

One of the better comments of late is Danny Ayers’ call to start seeing web applications as “features of the web” rather than standalone entities. The Semantic Web will never evolve if we merely see web services as ways to escape writing certain pieces of code ourselves; we need instead to be trying to grasp at how the whole might work.

As my previous post indicated, I’m working on some ideas for some local websites designed to develop community and support local businesses. While there’s certainly a need for distinct interfaces to the data–to enable people to focus on their particular interests, or so that multiple organizations can have a sense of ownership–each interface will be considerably enhanced if the sites are geographically aware and interoperable.

If, for instance, I am going to a concert downtown I’d like to know what other events are happening nearby or where to eat. Rather than having to go and perform extra searches elsewhere, it would be useful if the site presented me with some of that information. And rather than having to have one organization keep track of all the information, it would be far better to have everything provided in a machine digestible format, with the different sites querying one another (either on-demand or regularly) and a simple way of plugging in other information sources.

That’s why Grand Rapids WiFi is now publishing as much data as possible in RDF/XML, and other sites will do likewise. I suspect that the development of the web as a platform will follow a similar route to the adoption of standards-based design: more and more of us started migrating/building our small sites that way, pressure built and suddenly the big guys were getting in on the act. To be honest, I can’t remember whether the analysts were in on that act, but I also can’t remember that mattering most of the time.

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