Its alive!!

Crikey, I gotta say I'm surprised, but it was only a few hours ago that I'd figured out why my first forays into php had failed and now, now my skills website thing works.

Its all functional. It even has a background color!! I know!

Its still a work in progress, so don't get your hopes too high. At the moment it consists of two sections, the skill directory and the checkbox page.

The former is a crappy encyclopedia of skills, crafts and hobbies which are all linked together with tags, you can start navigating around from this page. If you click on Graphic arts, it'll take you to a brief description of the category and a list of the various types of Graphic arts, then if you click on one of those you'll get a more indepth description and a list of other associated tags.

The checkbox page is a list of all the skills in the database, you can check of the ones that you can do, then when you click the button at the bottom of the page, it logs all your selections with a random ID and counts them and presents this as your score.

There's still a long way to go, but it works, and I'm so proud, feel free to play around, its pretty robust.

Please don't tell other people about it yet.

Here's a list of features and pages I need to add:-

• statcounter code in the page footers
• sort out header and footer in all pages
• a home/index page with statistics (most popular, least popular, untried skills, average score, median score)
• an about page with me rambling
• descriptions for all the the skills
• statistics about your score
• better ordering of skills on checklist page so its more intuitive
• most popular skills on taginfo page
• my own photos for skills
• auto re-size photos
• discipline page which calculates which tag are subdisciplines
• scoring system based on popularity of skills
• your score for each discipline
• page to add new skills and tags
• page to delete skills from all tables
• page to delete photos
• page of database errors like skills without descriptions, tags without skills, etc.
• logos and stuff
• amazon affiliate links to instruction books for each skill
• links to tutorial websites for each skill
• recommendation engine.

Further adventures in php and GeekSkills or whatever

Something unseen grabbed my throat and dragged me to google, my fingers danced over the keyboard and searched for php tutorials. Before me, on my screen, the aborted php script for my websitey idea appeared and my eyes were drawn to a typo.

I had spelt html wrong.

No sooner was it corrected, and ftp'ed across to chrisgilmour.co.uk, and it worked, a few lines of my database appeared in my browser, summoned from MySQL by my php script.

And so it began once more, resurrecting my ambitions and dreams of winning the internet with an arty, crafty, etsy, songkicky website.

I came up with a new name for it too, instead of GeekSkills. I needed something that wasn't in any dictionary, a new word that sounds a little like arts or crafts or skills. I came up with 'SKILMO', like more skills, but also like half hearing someone call my name.

Anyhoo, here are three pages I've crafted for the site:-

List of Skills - this is a list of all the skills on the database, there are hundreds of them
Skill information - this is the description and associated tags for one of the skills
Skills with a specific tag - This is a list of all the skills that have a specified tag

I want it all to work first, all the php, sql and MySQL stuff working together before I try to make it beautiful.

My next task is to make it so when you click on a Skill on the first page, it brings up the Skill information page for that skill.

And then some kind of form page where you click checkboxes for all the skills you have and crafts you can do, then it gives you an arbitary score and secretly saves your skillset.

Thick Creamy Podcast 12-10-2012

Here's the latest Thick Creamy Podcast, bands playing live at a gig the other night, and me talking

RIGHT CLICK SAVE AS

Instead of using SoundCloud or whatever it was I used to use, its up on my own servery thing, ChrisGilmour.co.uk which is kind of neat, but alas there's no streaming player thing so you'll have to right click and save as...

The gig was a Odd Box Records night at The Tipsy Bar in Dalston featuring City Yelps, Fever Dream and September Girls.

It was a bit of a struggle to find the venue, and I'd set off a little late, and the venue was really dark, so I only caught the last two songs of City Yelps. They were noisy, but fun. I dunno whether its just my small palette of band descriptions or Oddbox's taste in music, but I thought City Yelps had that post-punk late seventies Liverpool sound, maybe Joy Division too. I wish I'd caught all of their set.

Second band were Fever Dream, who are awesome. They sound a little art school, really well assembled tunes.

Fever Dream at The Tipsy Bar

Headlining the night were September Girls from Dublin, they were dressed as The Bangles, and played a neat cover of The Clapping Song.

September Girls at The Tipsy Bar

On the way home from the show I tried to record all my talkie bits for the podcast whilst I was drunk and wandering through Ridley Road Market. But when I listened to it in the morning there was this water pouring noise in the background which sounded like I was pissing, and I'd mangled one of the band names.

Its possible to subscribe to these Thick Creamy Podcasts on iTunes so they download automagically every time I put up a new one.

Simply go into the 'Advanced' menu in iTunes, click 'Subscribe to Podcast' and then paste in this rss feed

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThickCreamyPodcast

and that should give you all the podcasts, forever.