Well nostuff has been with Dreamhost for a while now, and they are responsible for running the dream. the dream was the ideal of nostuff, which was, ummm, no stuff. They gave me so many goodies that I have ended up with, well, stuff.

For the techies, they give shell access, cron and a powerful web-based control panel and good control over the domain.

Example: I only have one domain associated with my account (i could have more). but I can set up sub-domains easily. Each can be anything you dream of: a redirect, a directory of your main site, something completely separate, have it’s own (unlimited) email addresses (hello@whatever.nostuff.org), have it’s onw google apps etc. Very impressive list of options. The whole setup is very flexible, so if you want to do something unusual with your mail setup or whatever, then you probably can. It’s also the little things, it’s not just that I can setup a Wordpress blog with one click, but I can setup unlimited number, at any domain, sub-domain, directory and database I choose, and setup with a good selection of themes and plugins.

This evening I have installed moodle (1 minute), setup words.nostuff.org to point to da blog, setup google apps on nostuff.org (start.nostuff.org, docs.nostuff.org and loads more) and upgraded two blogs to the latest version.

So this is one big advert for dreamhost.

Must find complaints… hmmm, having a web host running servers in West Cost US time when you are in the UK can be a slight pain, and there can be a tiny lag at times (I think). Though my last host was a very simple affair I was never aware of my website being down. Dreamhost have had a few problems leading to downtime, and they seem to take a while to fully resolve it (they do follow up with blog postings explaining why, but of course swear a strange one off occurance caused it and it will never happen again).

But that’s all nickpicking.

All in all, very impressed, and glad I moved my site here.

Now, having written all this (and only after writing all this), I’ve just had the idea of linking to this sign up link and mentioning the sign up code NOSTUFF (using the code should mean YOU get $20 off, think of what you can do with all that cash). Using either means I get a tiny bit of cash off my next payment to Dreamhost, so if this tempts you at all, then hey I am not above whoring. Heck even if you don’t want a hosted domain service, perhaps you’re looking for a new dishwasher, or car insurance or smack, then sign up here, this is what you want. Just enter that promo code and enter you credit card details and do it before thinking about it.

For a while now I’ve been running a weekly script which connects to ROAR and grabs the number of records for each UK based Institutional Repository. I’ve finally got around to writing a web front end to this, which you can see here. All quite basic at the moment, and I have lots of ideas of what I could do to improve this (one idea based on the compare average number of deposits per repository). Have a look and let me know what you think, and let me know of any bugs.

UK Repository Records Statistics (the name sucks!)

Google released an API for their Book Search at the end of last week. You can implement this in two ways: static (just linking to a URL with a ISBN inserted) or dynamic, which basically means using javascript, which will check to see if Google have the book available as the page loads and can show a link accordingly.

The (very rough and basic) ‘catalogue’ I recently created already had a link to Google Books for each item. This was just a very simple URL with an ISBN stuck on the end, e.g. http://books.google.com/books?as_isbn=0596003722

Tonight I have made the first steps in adding links to items using the Google Books API using both the static (simple) and dynamic methods.

You can see an example here http://www.nostuff.org/tdn/6b/item.php?item=0596003722.

You can also do a search via http://www.nostuff.org/tdn/6b/

The layout is currently very rough, and the dynamic search is broken in that it will only show a result for the first ISBN for a given item (I know why but don’t have time to fix now).

I have to confess I know very little javascript. The examples from Google only use a few lines of code but not really understanding what it did, did not help. For example, for the dyanmic display, I found it did not work at all, until I added a second paragraph tag for every ISBN. I can’t see what in the js makes this so

pizdaus.com : strangly addictive open submission photo site.

You may have already seen that a while a go I had a little play with the Talis Platform, and specifically a ’store’ on the platform called ukbib which holds bibliographic records. I’ve written some pages on learning about the various parts to the platform. I had seen on the Talis Developer Network (TDN) various web services, but they all blurred in to one, the pages linked to above first work out the simple ones (e.g. linking to catalogues, holdings etc), this helped clear up the different bits that are available.

The pages then move on to playing with the ukbib ’store’ which returns XML, you can then use XSLT to turn this in to (x)html.

So, after playing with XML, XSLT, and improving my CSS along the way, I can show the very first ’work in progress’:

demostration of the library catalogue search.

All very early days, layout is quite basic and a number of things don’t work.

Things that don’t work (or sometimes don’t work):

•  The options on the right are based on the first ISBN found. Some recordshave several ISBNs andthe first one may be a ‘odd’ one, therefore searching Amazon, Wikipedia, libraryThing based on the unusal ISBN will probably produce either no result or the wrong item.
• “See Books by” Author search on the bottom right hand side doesn’t work. The formating of the author’s name is probably not helping, and because this is being done in XSLT I can’t call [the php function] urlencode to turn the author names in to nice strings for the URL.
• Some of the Subject searches don’t work or return odd results. This will hopefully be simply to fix.
• holdings from libraries are not there yet.

Things you can do:

•  in the google-style search box you can prefix any field name to the front of a search term, e.g. Title:”programming perl”

• title:programming title:perl author:wall

• subject:”DDC: 005.72″

• You can basically use any field name, I didn’t write this, it is part of the way the platform works, see here for more.

• link to the same item (if we have the right isbn, see above) on a number of other web sites, including wikipedia, Amazon, LibraryThing etc (let’s face it, this isn’t rocket science).

This is very much a work in progress, will hopefully have another update soon.

Now I need to find out why the above search uses ”author:wall” when the underlying xml uses ’creator’ not ’author’. hmmm.

Airports positioned so that landing aircraft kill everyone on the beach are cool!:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=zAfQwDizpRo

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=rLMMLmfVa-k
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=WTLGsEErWJY

(Wordpress seems to get upset when I embed a youtube file)