David Elks

I'm just playing around BlogPress just to see whether I can post from my phone. Yes, it would appear, I can. Excellent news.

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I've produced my first video in a while on the back of my limited contribution to an effort to stop a power station being built in my back yard. There's quite a lot of shaky cam and some of the shots are less than perfect, but I hope to have used some music and decent edits to carry off a decent package of what we were trying to achieve. Let me know what you think...

Possibly a bit later than I would have hoped to have written this - I've been snowed under at work.
 
REVOLUTION. Conflict. Opportunities. Not exactly the words you expect to hear to describe a conference, particularly about a subject such as hyperlocal blogging.
But they were among the words used by speakers at the recent Talk About Local Unconference at Staffordshire University.

Shameless self-interest:

Say No to Blythe Park Power | vvsm.co.uk http://vvsm.co.uk/ - help stop proposed power station in greenfield site - which happens to be 200 metres from where I live - and sign the Number 10 epetition.

In the past three days I've been to two conferences. One was the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in Kensington, the second was the Talk About Local Unconference 2009 at Staffordshire University.
It's going to take a bit of time to write up so here's the first part, devoted to the first day at Fowa...

FOWA 2009 - the Future of Web Apps

There is nothing as inspirational as the story of success, or so goes the theory behind trade and business conferences.

There's always been something about the band Eels and its eccentric frontman Mark Everett that I've loved.

I remember sitting in a car on the way to work when I first Whether it was the first time I heard the quirky hit Susan's House in 1996, and I realised I loved the mixed-up magic of their work.

Local stuff

Welcome to Theartbay Gallery in Fenton - http://www.theartbay.co.uk/
Cycling City how £4.8million has been spent - http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/ Ian Norris has used the popular FOI site to ask how Stoke-on-Trent City Council managed to spend £4.8 million on promoting the city as a centre of excellence for cycling.

News21 | Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education - http://www.news21.com
paulb's ugc and research Bookmarks on Delicious - http://delicious.com/paulb
Embeddable Google Document Viewer - http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009

curtismorley.com helps me solve irritating #1119 error in as3 - http://curtismorley.com/

I've had a go at making my own RSS players before in Flash, but tended to give up as soon as it involved getting into the nitty-gritty of parsing the XML, with references to children and all that malarkey.

Then there's applications such as Google's Ajax Feed API which is pretty much useful in most situations when I've need to get an RSS list into a web page.

Here's an example on The Sentinel website.

I've decided to have another go at it for two reasons. 1) Just to prove to myself that I can. 2) to learn some basic principles that I can use for building more sophisticated projects all based on XML scripts.

The player below is my first attempt at building a reader using one of Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow simple-but-brilliant video tutorials.

As you can see, the package works, but there is all sorts of extraneous HTML junk that I'll now need to sift through to make it fully useable.

If anyone can show me a really simple way of parsing through the gubbins then great. If not, I'll keep scratching around until I find something that works

UPDATE: Just one attribute was needed to make the change. Instead of feeding the XML feed into a clip with the attribute movieClip.text, it should have been movieClip.htmlText and then it works. Even brings in pictures.