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Archives for November 2006

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News Map

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Matthew Cashmore | 13:21 UK time, Thursday, 23 November 2006

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Just came across this map (as I was looking for a Technorati tags plugin for WordPress) built by Ben O'Neill. It's clever, I particularly like the way it loads the last 12 hours of stories, rather than just the live feeds at the moment. It's probably just a few clicks from becoming a widget too.

news_map.jpg

Trafficeye

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Ian Forrester Ian Forrester | 10:45 UK time, Friday, 17 November 2006

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trafficeye.jpg
Trafficeye was spotted in the wild by Alistair. It uses Microsoft Virtual Earth and plots ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ traffic data on top of the map. The creators describe trafficeye as your fast reference point for real-time UK traffic information.

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio Player Gadget

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Ian Forrester Ian Forrester | 10:36 UK time, Friday, 17 November 2006

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³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio Player Gadget

The reason why i built this vista sidebar gadget is so i could have easy access to the bbc radio stations it was build using good old notepad ;) using javascript and html

Christmas Bash - <del>Sign up now!</del>

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Matthew Cashmore | 12:31 UK time, Friday, 10 November 2006

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The time has come to put your name where your Christmas spirit is and sign up for the very cool ! The event is confirmed for Saturday 9th December between 6:30pm - 1am. The event is free to attend.

The party is being held at the very exclusive,

So use this form to sign up now! We need accurate numbers to arrange the food and things, so please be kind and send us a note... see you all there.

The Form is now closed due to a 2:1 ratio on the reserved list.

Please use a valid email address as we will be sending out final details via email. Also any new signups from now on will be added to the reserved as we hit 400 sign-ups in exactly 35 hours. If people drop out, your name will be promoted on to the main list.

We will keep a running total of names signed up on the

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ ListenAgain

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Ian Forrester Ian Forrester | 11:32 UK time, Friday, 10 November 2006

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³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Listen Again Dashboard Widget

An Apple dashboard widget that plays almost all listen again radio streams that are usually available via the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio player.

I wrote this widget a few months ago, it has been a big success and I notice it has even been mentioned a few times on these pages - looks like I'm a few days late for the competition though :-(

Anyway, the way the widget works at the moment is by scraping the radio player web pages looking for the radio stream links - this makes it very fragile to changes in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ web site. I would love to update it to use a xml feed instead.

Widget Winners!

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Matthew Cashmore | 13:41 UK time, Tuesday, 7 November 2006

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I'm really pleased to announce the backstage.bbc.co.uk widget winners! We formally announced the winners at the widget bash last night at Digress City.

You can see the photos from last night (and please add yours!) in our new

But without further distractions... the winners!

We decided to award three runner up places - each winning a brand new iPod Shuffle, the runners up were

The three winners are (winning an Apple iPod- 3rd, a Nokia 770 - 2nd and a Samsung Q1 - 1st)

  • 3rd Place -
  • 2nd Place -
  • 1st Place -

Congratulations to all involved, we'll be in contact with the winners shortly to get your prizes sent out!

Search ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Video

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Ian Forrester Ian Forrester | 15:43 UK time, Monday, 6 November 2006

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seachbbcav.jpg

Searches close to 300,000 video clips on www.bbc.co.uk and serves them up in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ media selector.

Its seems to be indexing the Beta ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ AV RSS feeds and looking at other sources. The HTML is very simple and the URL syntax nice enough. There is also support for simple Boolean searches.

gTraffic.info v2.0

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Ian Forrester Ian Forrester | 11:06 UK time, Friday, 3 November 2006

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gtraffic shot.jpg

Version 2.0 of website gTraffic.info has gone online. The site has been completely rewritten using Google Web Toolkit (GWT). This site takes traffic data, including ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ data, and plots it on a Google map. Highlights of the new site include

New look and feel.
Zebra list style with sortable columns.
Selection menu indicates which dataset is currently active.
All event categories are now listed in traffic view.
Map 'overview' button will take you back to dataset overview zoom level.
Some help pages (working on improving this).
'Busy' indicator.
Permalink feature.

I have gradually been making improvements to this site since it's initial launch in June 2005. I hope everyone likes the changes.

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Backstage widgets competition entries

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Ian Forrester Ian Forrester | 17:42 UK time, Thursday, 2 November 2006

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So the closed yesterday (Wednesday 1st November). These are the entries we received over the month of October.

  • now and next
    by Mario Menti
  • uk travel news.jpg
    by It Becomes Fluid Ltd
  • chris moyles.jpg
    by Davinder Mahal
  • zeepe widget.jpg
    by Pete Cole
    Direct link to Zeepe Widget (requires )
  • bbcnews ticker small
    by Nigel Crawley
  • bbc radio1 widget
    by Davinder Mahal
  • adders traffic info small.jpg
    by Adam Leach
  • my fav bands
    by Paul Jefferson
  • world news widget
    by Al Petfield



There will be 3 judges and they will announce there combined top 3 widgets on Monday at the , hope to see you . There will also be other surprises on the night.

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ World News Widget

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Ian Forrester Ian Forrester | 17:31 UK time, Thursday, 2 November 2006

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³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ World News Widget

This is a Flash-based widget that shows the latest world headlines on a revolving 3D map. For each item in the XML feed, it shows the headline, the short summary and an indicator showing where in the world the item originated. Mouseover the map to pause and click to view that whole story. The headlines are refreshed every 15 minutes.

+ How it works

The Flash movie is built with two main subroutines - one that displays a 3D map of the world that turns automatically and can be triggered to move to a different location, and one that gathers the news feed (via a proxy php page to get around the Flash cross domain security issue), works out where each story belongs, and then triggers the map accordingly.

+ Improvements

At the moment it's pretty processor-intensive - doing all those 3D calculations takes its toll, but hey, it's just a prototype. If I had more time then I'd work on optimizing the routines to make it less demanding on the CPU. It would be nice to able to make the map far more detailed too.

My Favourite Bands

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Ian Forrester Ian Forrester | 17:17 UK time, Thursday, 2 November 2006

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google gadget

This Google Gadget takes your favourite bands from the RSS feed off last.fm and then searches the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ for both news about them and TV and Radio appearances they are making.
It is set by default to Radio 1's last.fm account, but you can change this to any account you want by pressing the edit button.

I made it so that I know where and when I can see my favourite bands on TV/Radio since I always seem to miss it somehow (plus the chance to win a 'well known music player':) ) If I had unlimited time/money I would like to figure out a way to distinguish between different things on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News/listings searchs (e.g. Keane the band, Roy Keane, Robbie Keane all turn up if you like Keane) and a way to make the listings look like links to call up the synopsis (they do work but they just don't look like links).

Adders Traffic

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Ian Forrester Ian Forrester | 16:53 UK time, Thursday, 2 November 2006

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adders traffic info

My Yahoo Widget is written to provide local traffic information direct to your desktop. The idea started, as there doesn't appear to be an easy way to find any road incidents within 5/10/15/etc miles of your current location.

The widget currently accepts a postcode and a range set in the preferences and retrieves the all incidents within the range from the specified postcode.

The server is updating its database from the Backstage Traffic Data feeds and then providing the information via a simple xml feed that is then used for both the Widget and the Google map on the site.

I just need to find some time to add the additional information in the Traffic feeds to the Widget and improve the quality and presentation of the information provided.

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio 1 Widget

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Ian Forrester Ian Forrester | 16:50 UK time, Thursday, 2 November 2006

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³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio 1 Widget

A simple dashboard widget to display the main ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio 1 RSS feed for Mac OS X Tiger users.

It'll be nice to include the other feeds from the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio 1 site - if only they validated like the main feed did.

Mac OS X Dashboard ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News Ticker

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Ian Forrester Ian Forrester | 16:47 UK time, Thursday, 2 November 2006

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bbcnewstickerlarge.jpg

On the 23 May 2005 I submitted an 'Ajax RSS News Reader' prototype to the backstage website.

Following a comment about my News Reader, I've finally got round to building a Mac OS X 'Tiger' Dashboard widget version to enter in the widget competition.

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio Live'n'ByNet widget

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Ian Forrester Ian Forrester | 16:33 UK time, Thursday, 2 November 2006

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Live'n'ByNet is a player widget for the live bbc radio feeds as listed by the programmes API. The widget uses the Zeepe framework - a web browser application/widget framework.

Why was it built?
Because I wanted a player that can be minimised to the tray and one that doesn't have hard coded urls to streams. It also lists the programmes via the API so you can set 'alarms' where it tunes to programmes when they start.

Improvements?
Access to an API that lists the listen again streams. It would be great to be able to choose favourites for the repeating programmes and in combination with the timings from the live streams then enable 'drag and drop personal channel' creation. Other improvements would be the programmes API becoming standardised and used by commercial radio as well - the player then becomes just like its real world equivalent.

Widget: Chris Moyles Widget

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Ian Forrester Ian Forrester | 14:09 UK time, Wednesday, 1 November 2006

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The Chris Moyles Widget is a Dashboard widget for Mac OS X Tiger. The widget reads the Chris Moyles Blog RSS feed and displays it in a nice fashion. The widget also includes the links back to the main Chris Moyles Radio 1 web site.
As of right now, the widget does the job. I might add information to display if the next podcast is available or not. If there any suggestions for extra features please let me know.

I built the widget so that I could quickly and easily see when the blog was updated. What would be nice, is if there was a way to see who wrote the blog entry, as a different member of the team writes each day. It'll be nice to be able to display who wrote the blog entry in the widget.

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