rob hammond

Certain people in certain political parties seem obsessed with the UK’s relationship with Europe and our position within the EU. But how much do the UK electorate actually care about Europe as an issue? Does the rise of the single-issue party Ukip actually have anything to do with their one policy goal?

There’s some interesting quantitative data that can be gleaned from Google Trends on this issue, given people generally tend to search for information on issues that are important to them (see also Google Flu Trends).

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I’ve spent the last year or so of my daily commute building a social bookmarking site that for me has now replaced my use of delicious, and I think offers more than other services such as diigo, Google Bookmarks et al.

Now with a new job on the horizon, I want to spend less time on building the site, but at the same time don’t want it to stagnate.

To that end, today I’m releasing an open source version of the social bookmarking site bkmrx.com on Github, and have uploaded a live version of the open source site at bkmrx.org. This is a fairly comprehensive rewrite of the website into a Mojolicious and MongoDB stack (bkmrx.com is mainly PHP & MySQL), and as such is not a full replication of the features available on bkmrx.com (see the about page for a comparison).

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I was just going through some old work files and came across some research I did in 2010 and 2011 but completely forgot about until now. It was a fairly straightforward analysis of the occurrence of keywords in domains, sub-domains and URL paths in Google’s top 100 results for the term [broadband].

Given the effects of the dreaded EMD update, I thought it would be interesting to run this again in light of Google’s changes. The results were pretty interesting:

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I spent last weekend at the Mozilla Festival in London – the first conference I’ve been to in a while which wasn’t search or usability related. I was initially unsure about going, as I’m not a hardcore programmer, nor an expert on JavaScript, and not hugely interested in web gaming. However I was curious enough in general and about the open journalism track to stump up the very reasonable £40 for a two day event.

Below is my summary of the sessions I attended and a selection from the plethora of interesting stuff I found out about:

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These days most crawling and scraping tools use XPath or increasingly CSS3 selectors to parse HTML rather than the lengthy & obtuse regular expressions of old.

However unlike regexes, there’s not much in the way of online testing tools for CSS3 selectors (ie none that I could find), so using the excellent CSS selector support in Mojolicious I knocked up a simple CSS3 selector tester (say that 3 times fast) in ~1hr.

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