Anyway, what have I been up to:

Most of my time has been taken up by an exciting project i’ve been working on at: http://www.MatlockTown.net

This site will be a social network for my local town of Matlock with all the greatest features of the big social sites such as a footerbar chat like facebook/myspace, image tagging and adding video streams from sites like YouTube! Contact details can be found on the site if you want to take part in Beta testing it!

Another site I’ve been working on is called M.A.S.T found at: http://www.mastrust.org

M.A.S.T stands for Matlock Area Schools Trust, they attend school assemblies and help run childrens clubs to promote the Christian faith. You can find out more about them by visiting the website. I designed (I know the design isnt great, but im not a designer..) and developed a simple CMS for them to manage/update their site.

Promotion and Advertising has been my biggest weakness but I’m improving and learning of new ways to do this. I have 2 facebook accounts (1 personal and 1 for website promotion), 2 Twitter accounts (both promotion), 2 YouTube accounts (both personal but thinking of another for promotion). Along with social advertising I have been reading up on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques to help promote my clients websites.

OddJobs are what I have been doing on and off over the last 5 or so years on the internet. Helping coders out with snippets, creating mods for established scripts. The latest addition to this was for a CMS called BigAce which I helped translate from Bad English to hopefully Good English – Not really translating but it certainly felt like it with the number of mistakes I had to correct! Other than that I also make a small mod for the CMS called the Twitter Portlet which is basically just a widget that displays a Twitter feed but it only took about 5 minutes to make.. Link: http://www.bigace.de

Lastly is the social/personal activities, while I spend alot of time with my clients work, outside of this I tend to spend alot of time with my friend/family taking trips, playing football weekly, pool/snooker, gaming and eating out. We all need to have a social life!

Anyway, none of the above is an excuse for my post absence on here and I do wish to continue to add some technology news/reviews etc. as im sure your now sick of my personal ones ranting, complaining etc.

Apress Beginning PHP and MySQL Third Edition

I have alot of spare time on my hands since im currently unemployed (give me a job!! lol) so I spend it quite wisely improving my knowledge of web programming languages by both writing web scripts/code snippets for various well known scripts on the internet and reading various books I’ve bought and been given over the past few years.

My latest book that I’m reading is called Beginning PHP and MySQL by publisher Apress. This 1000 page book gives detailed examples of both PHP and MySQL, guiding you from the basics towards advanced topics such as database security and using SMARTY templating.

I am about 150 pages into this book and find it very interesting to read even though I already know quite abit from the code I’ve written (its nice to know what things are called!).

I would recommend anyone wanting to get into web development, especially into PHP to read this book as it covers the majority of the programming language, even if the 1000 pages put you off.

The only downside to this book is that its not one of those books that gets you to work through examples, instead its more of a reference book and can be hard to get into without a real desire and determination to get through it.

Overall I really like this book, with its detailed descriptions of every aspect of php and mysql but lacks working examples of other similar books so it can be hard to read. I’d give it 8/10

I will explain other books as I get through them, including books about ASP, ASP.NET, Javascript and Ajax.

What books are you currently reading? Or when was the last time you read a book?

These extra icons allow you to re-order, add or remove certain search results. The service which is named “SearchWiki” will then remember these actions for the next time you search for the same thing.

Google are calling it a revolutionary step in search capabilities and I can see that after using this more and more you can finally get rid of those useless/spam/harmful sites from your searches!

Hopefully they will make it available to the public and not only the account holders but its a great step to a more refined/customized web!

The suit can take 15 minutes – using a plastic bag over each foot – to put on, as it hugs the body up to 70 times tighter than other suits. Rebecca Adlington won two gold medals in hers, but complained of raw knuckles after the struggle to get it on. The elite swimmers still love them. ‘I feel like a rocket,’ said Michael Phelps, who helped test the suits, before going on to win an unprecedented eight golds in Beijing.

The suit was created by Speedo’s Aqualab, the company’s global research-and-development facility in Nottingham. It is headed by Jason Rance and includes the senior team of Charles Wilson (fabric development manager), Melanie Simmons (garment engineer) and Sophy White (designer). Rance waves away the controversy surrounding the suit. ‘It is the swimmer, not the suit, that breaks world records,’ he says. ‘When you look back in history there has always been controversy. In 1928, when Speedo went from woollen swimsuits to silk swimsuits, there was moral outrage because it was skin-tight material. When we created the racer back to help Arne Borg [Swedish world champion in the 1920s] to swim faster, that caused outrage because you were showing the naked shoulder. Similarly when we removed the skirt from the female suits, which created huge improvements in performance.’

Biomechanical engineers, physiologists, sports scientists, physiotherapists, more than 100 elite swimmers – and even a wind tunnel at Nasa – were involved in the three-year development of the suit. Everything was done in secret to prevent copycat products. The swimmers, sworn to confidentiality, tested early in the morning or late at night – ‘all very cloak and dagger’, Rance says.

Aqualab invented a fabric that cuts drag and applies pressure on the body to make it more hydrodynamic. The swimmer moves more easily through the water, economising on oxygen by around 5 per cent. Other innovations included integrating a corset into the main body of the suit. ‘It gives an athlete more core stability,’ Rance says, ‘and that helps them maintain the correct position in the water. Say Rebecca Adlington is swimming 800metres and starts tiring, her hips start dropping and her legs start dragging so she cannot swim as fast. But if she is helped to maintain the correct position then she is at a huge advantage.’

At £320, the LZR Racer is out of the price range of some swimmers, particularly those from developing countries. But in Beijing the company offered free suits to any athlete that wanted one and gave away more than 3,000. Much to Speedo’s glee, swimmers sponsored by rival brands flocked to wear them; even more tellingly, 94 per cent of all Beijing’s swimming golds were won by athletes wearing the LZR Racer.

‘It’s part of the evolution of the sport,’ Rance says, ‘and it’s really exciting for swimmers. They say they feel like Superman.’ Speedo has already started work on a new suit for 2012, which can only be good for competition: its rivals will not want to be caught out again.