What I also love is its openness, as well as being able to pull out reports for problems in your area, you can also inject problem reports directly into the system, meaning anyone can build their own front end for the system.

I’ve been thinking about Fixmystreet a lot recently, after building my own frontend for it via the Ubermap, I’ve also been thinking about repurposing our existing streetscene reporting forms, and getting them to use Fixmystreet.

It was while fiddling about under the hood, that I thought ‘wouldn’t it be cool if people could report problems via Twitter?’

Twitter is a fast way of communicating, and crucially, it’s mobile. There’s a plethora of mobile apps and frontends for Twitter, and even if you’re only on an aged Nokia 3310, you can send tweets by text message. This means that when you spot a problem, you can report it straight away. You could even add a picture.

I got cracking on it, and, within the space of 24 hours I had a prototype – users sign up with their Twitter username and email address on the Fixmytweet website, and whenever they spot a problem, they can send a tweet in this format:

@fixmytweet {postcode} {description of problem} {twitpic link (optional)}

(If you’ve got a smartphone with a Twitter app that supports the geolocation API you don’t even need the postcode!)

The system then parses the tweet and sends the necessaries to Fixmystreet. Fixmystreet then sends an email to the user, with a link for them to add more detail and approve the report. It then gets sent directly to the council! (and, if the council is smart, they can even integrate it with their CRM system)

I’m currently testing this out on a test version of Fixmystreet, and it seems to be working well so far. If you’re interested in helping test me test it, please sign up on the Fixmytweet website and send a test tweet.

I’ll keep everyone posted on developments on Twitter and this here blog!

Adrian Short (he of Mash the State fame) recently blogged about his barcode posters site, which allows you to change RSS feeds into printable documents with QR barcodes (those thingies above) attached to each article – people with smartphones that can read barcodes (iPhone, Android etc) can then scan the code and link directly to the article. It’s almost like hyperlinks for real life.

I’ve had this idea on the back burner for a while now, but after tweeting about seeing the first new style Ratemyplace (a website I run which publishes food safety scores online) poster ‘in the wild’ – I got this reply:

This made me think – it’s a perfect fit for barcode posters – people can see the inspection certificate and scan the barcode to find more information. You can see an example of what I dun here

Now, I know what you’re thinking – ‘but generating images server side is hard! It’ll take me ages fiddling around with various libraries and I’ll be pulling my hair out with frustration!’ – Not so – Thanks to the wonderful people at Google, all you need to do to generate a barcode for a given URL is this:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=125&cht=qr&chl={url-goes-here}

You can then stick it in the src attribute of an IMG tag and display it on a page like so:

(Make sure you encode the URL of the website either on the server or using this handy online url encoder.)

Simple innit? There’s more explanation of the whys and wherefores of QR barcodes on the Barcode posters website. Now get out there and barcode!

Whilst working on a new community blog for the North Lichfield Initiative I found that excuse.

The guy I was training to update the blog wanted an easy way to show Flickr slideshows on posts and pages and didn’t want to mess around with code. I first tried using Flickr Slideshow, which generates code to embed Flickr slideshows into websites, but found that the visual editor strips away the iframe code when you publish the post.

I searched and searched through the WordPress plugins, but couldn’t find anything that did what I wanted to do quickly and easily – so I rolled up my sleeves and got my hands dirty!

The result is Flickr Flash Slideshow – all you need to do is put the link the to user, set or group you want a slideshow of between [ flickr][ /flickr] tags (without the spaces) like so:

[ flickr]url[ /flickr]

You can also add the width or height of the slideshow like so:

[ flickr]url,width,height[ /flickr]

If the width and height is left out, then the plugin defaults to 300px x 300px

Check out an example here:

I was amazed by how quickly I could put it together and it’s further cemented my belief that WordPress is one of the best, if not best open source projects ever – a lot of projects could learn from its ease and extensibility.

Anyways, if you want the plugin, please Download it here and let me know if you have any problems! I’m sure it’ll come in handy for a lot of community based sites who’s users may not have enough technical knowledge to edit raw HTML.

Update: I’ve finally got access to the WordPress SVN repository, so you should be able to install it directly from your admin section – just search for ‘Flickr Flash Slideshow’

For those of you who don’t know, Ernest Marples was / is a system that provided not-for-profit sites (such as HealthWhere, JobcentreProPlus.com, Planning Alerts and, by extension Twitterplan) with latitude and longitude data from postcodes, which means that people can get information about their areas with only their postcode.

Because Ernest Marples has been served with this notice, none of these sites can function, meaning the Royal Mail (who are *supposed* to be a public service) are directly responsible for taking away a wealth of useful tools from the public it’s *supposed* to serve.

Judging by the

With the recent publication of the Digital Britain report and Gordon Brown calling on Tim Berners-Lee to help open up access to government data, there’s been a lot of talk about public organisations opening up data.

Most of this has focused around APIs and linked data (something I’m very passionate about already), but there’s much simpler ways to get data out there that might be useful to those people who might have a website, know their way a bit round HTML, but aren’t willing to get their hands dirty with XML, JSON or RDF.

I’m talking of course, about widgets, these are little bits of (often Javascript) code that people can copy and paste into their own websites. These can then be used by local blogs, newspapers or other websites to publish your content in a quick and easy way.

I’ve had a go at doing a few widgets, publishing food safety inspections and planning applications as widgets and I’m looking to do more in the future. Fellow blogger and techy Philip John has even turned one of our widgets into a WordPress-compatible widget, which I’m proudly sporting on the right here.

Essentially, what you’re doing is pulling information from a database (using PHP or whatever server-side technology you fancy) and outputting it as javascript code, wrapping it all in a document.write function. You can also use inline styling to style your widget, making sure you override any potential styles that might be overridden by the user’s stylesheet. A quick and dirty example is below:


<?php
$query = "SELECT * FROM database";
$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());
echo "document.write('";
echo "<h2 style=\"font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold;\">Planning Applications for Foo on Bar Council</h2>";
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
echo "<p><a href=\"".$row['link']."\">".$row['address']."</a>";
echo "<p>".$row['proposal']."</p>";
}
echo "');";
?>


Note: It’s very important that you make sure you get rid of all line breaks when you actually publish your content, otherwise you’ll get a Javascript error and the content won’t show up.

Once you’ve done this, you can then upload the script and then call it in a script tag, like below:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.mysite.com/myscript.php"></script>

And here’s one I made earlier!:

Really, the only limit is your imagination, so get out there and widgetise! It’s not a replacement for APIs, but it’s a good alternative for folks who might not be comfortable with the big stuff.

(P.S. The John Smith’s is there because it’s got a widget in the can, I’m not advocating the drinking of John Smith’s – it’s horrible stuff. Give me a proper cask ale any day)

If (like me) you’re a developer, or you’ve managed to :ahem: ‘acquire’ a copy of the version 3.0, you’ll notice that there’s a lot of cool new things, like search, voice notes, picture messaging (at last!) and copy and paste. One thing that wasn’t really trumpeted was the inclusion of a Javascript Geolocation API.

This API now means if (like me) you’ve not yet got your hands dirty with Objective C, and are quite comfortable with using Javascript and HTML thank you very much, you will now be able to get a user’s location using only those two methods in your web apps. Let’s take a peek:

Taking a peek

The Geolocation API is a W3C specification, which means that (in theory) it will be adopted by other browsers eventually (even desktop browsers!), so even if you’re not developing for iPhone, you’ll be able to use it!

The main crux of this is the Geolocaton object, which accepts a function to return if the call has been sucessful, a function to return if there’s been an error, and a few options. If we call the success function ‘showMap’ and the error function ‘error’ and ask the browser to try and get the best accuacy, the code will look something like this:

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(showMap, error, {enableHighAccuracy: true});

We then need to build our success function, which gets the position and then shows the user’s current location using the Google static maps API (using jQuery, ‘cos that’s how I roll)

function showMap(position) {
latitude = position.coords.latitude;
longitude = position.coords.longitude;
$("#map").html("<img src='http://maps.google.com/staticmap?center="+ latitude +","+ longitude +"&zoom=16&size=320x356&maptype=mobile&markers="+ latitude +","+ longitude +"&key=ABQIAAAAyUvSDBrAO4ePxVHcqp-K5hQ5esWtNpQWehF-Z9NQeJEFHAWuORRop2dJC86rRc7w8ebZJ0ODn4_-bQ&sensor=false' />")
}

(Obviously you’ll need to generate a new API key for your own site, I’ve included mine here)

The error function is simply a function that shows an error pop up:

function error() {
alert("Couldn't get location!");
}

You can do other stuff, such as showing exactly what went wrong, but I’ll leave that up to you. It’s all in the API anyway.

That’s literally it! All you need to do then is wrap the whole lot in a function and then call it onload. You can see an example here (obviously it won’t work if you’re not using the new iPhone software)

Hope this has been useful, any questions, check out the documentation, or ask in the comments!

A bit more…

Since writing this post I’ve noticed that the accuracy wasn’t great, I’ve now updated the demo to use watchPosition to try and get the most accurate position. It tries 7 times to get a location accuracy of below 100, if not, an error message shows and the best possible location is shown. The script now looks like this:

var count = 0