Irish Web Developer

My Little Man

aonghusflynn — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:16:05 +0000

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Is the average Facebook user thick?

aonghusflynn — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:55:07 +0000

This is hillarious, Read Write Web do a story about aol and Facebook doing a deal to integrate facebook into Aol’s instant messanger. The story ranks really well for the term “Facebook Login” on Google.

Have a look at the comments to get an idea of the calibre of facebook user.

Maybe teaching facebook in schools is not too far-fetched.

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Loves a good ad I do

aonghusflynn — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:36:38 +0000

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We won a game!

aonghusflynn — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:01:08 +0000

So soccer night was tonight and we managed to grind out a rare win.

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Feeding Time

aonghusflynn — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:56:57 +0000

Feeding Time
Originally uploaded by Aonghus Flynn

I was down at my brother’s farm over the weekend. “Helped” with the feeding. (Well I didn’t get in the way at least.)

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Just cos it’s rainy

aonghusflynn — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:05:48 +0000

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Irish guy travels the Americas, takes photos

aonghusflynn — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:53:08 +0000

A really good photography blog by Oisin Prendiville is http://www.day516.com/. For sheer perseverance alone you should visit it.

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Can’t get to work? You should be in the cloud.

aonghusflynn — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:26:05 +0000

With all the snow around at the moment, roads in Ireland are treacherous. Now the government has told us that there are only 2 days worth of grit available. Going to work is rapidly becoming an extreme sport.

Imagine though, if you didn’t have to leave your house. Imagine if all your work was available to you where ever you have an internet connection. That is the power of cloud computing. You can access your data anywhere. Not only that, you can also work on it.

There are loads of applications that are solely based on-line. In fact, you can do pretty much anything in web based applications. The only limitations seem to be video/imaging editing although even that is changing.

For business applications salesforce.com is definitely worth a look. If you are involved in sales, marketing or services having a salesforce account at the moment could be a life-saver. The ability to log on from anywhere, even from an iphone or blackberry, offers a huge advantage over on premise software solutions, especially in the weather conditions we have at the moment.

Not to mention the fact that the TCO is lower for cloud based solutions. No need for expensive hardware or the staff to maintain it.

So if the climate (economic or meteorological) is bad, maybe you should be working in the cloud.

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And so it begins…

aonghusflynn — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 23:44:32 +0000

I have started my project, so that’s half the battle then. I am using subversion for versioning. I know git is all the rage at the moment, but subversion is what I know and I’ll have enough on my plate learning Django and Google App Engine.

Using a versioning system is important when working on any project. Subversion allows you keep track of any changes that you make along the way. It also allows you to revert to previous versions if you make any mistakes. Finally, it can give you an offsite back up of your code. For example this blog is hosted on dreamhost. As well as hosting sites, they provide a few other things like hosting subversion repositories.

Tonight I created the repository that I’ll be using on dreamhost. The next thing I did was to create the base project that I will be using as a starting point. This is basically the one that comes with app engine patch. The next step was to import all the files into the repository.

Once this is done, it is safe to delete the local files. The next step is to perform a ‘checkout’. This pulls all your files from the repository. Once that’s done, it’s easy to keep the code up-to-date.

So there it is, the single step. Now just a thousand miles to go!

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New Year Resolution, something newsworthy

aonghusflynn — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:05:08 +0000

Well it’s January again so I’m going to start a personal project. The project I have in mind is really ambitious so I don’t want to go into details but it will be built in Django and hosted on Google App Engine.

The reasons for using these technologies are many-fold. I really want to learn Django and today I found app-engine-patch which allows better integration between Django and Google App Engine.

Anyway, back to my project. I think that the way people consume news is going to change in the future. I think that people like @marklittlenews have recognized this. I don’t think for a second that 6 0ne or newspapers are going away any time soon.

I do however think that the way we, the public, view the news is changing. The crash-landing on the Hudson in 2009 is a good example. It was all over twitter before it was on the news. Photos included. With a video camera included in nearly every phone. For example, my phone (the HTC Hero) has a video camera built in. I can even post videos directly to youtube. I can even stream videos live using a service like Qik. Photos are the same. Soon any news event will be broadcast on the web as soon as it happens.

Features will also be online. The excellent site Pictory is an example of the direction that I think features will go in.

So what does this mean for Journalists? Even with news events being captured as they happen, the background information, the meat of the story, will still be important. Usually, this comes from a built up network of contacts that comes from years covering stories.

And so, the project I am planning to build is a platform that brings the on the spot user generated news together with the experience and skill of journalists.

It’s an ambitious project, but what is the point of aiming low? There is a good chance that nothing will come of this, but hopefully I will learn something along the way.

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