While the code itself still sits over on Google Code, Nike+PHP's support site now has a new look!

I've moved it onto a Wordpress platform which makes administration and updating the site easier.

Version 1 or Nike+PHP has been out for a while and earlier this month I released v1.2.1.

The code has been downloaded over 100 times and I'm extremely proud of that fact! I would love to see how people are using the code, so please add to the Examples page on the wiki.

I also changed the branding for the project a little bit, but need time to work on the site, something I might do in March. The site is a little bright, something I wanted it to be, but I'll be toning it down a bit in the next refresh.

The old logo was dark, plain and, well, just boring!



The new one is lighter, has a bit of depth and contains the Nike logo (hope I don't get into any trouble for that!).

Possibly the best way of pronouncing the new year, 20:10 has already begun and I've already made more changes to http://charanj.it!

My portfolio site now has a slightly better layout, more functionality for the portfolio showcase and more key terms and information about me, as a developer.

I'm looking to improve the twitter situation, because not all my tweets are really suitable for my portfolio site, but I'll decide what to do with that a bit later!

As the world waves it's goodbye to the year that was 2009, I thought I'd write a quick post on how the year went for me.

I got married and achieved a lot of other personal milestones this year.

I got to see Hawaii and an active volcano. Got to see Anfield and sit in the Kop. I got to see Francesco Totti play for Roma at the Olympico while taking my wife around a city I love.

The year has had a few downs, but many many ups and I can't wait for the new year to start. Happy New Year all! :)

It's possible to make text looked blurred using just CSS3. See the examples below, just hover over the first bit of text to see the possibility of using blurred text as a hover state.

Some blurred text

Some blurred text

Example:

HTML:

<h1 class="blurred">Blurred text</h1>

CSS:

h1.blurred {
	color: #FFF;
}
h1.blurred:hover {
	cursor: pointer;
	color: #666!important;
	text-shadow: 0 0 5px #444;
}

The colours need to be selected carefully, as the shadows are often a bit lighter than the foreground text colour. Shadow size also plays a role. 5px seems to be effective, but 10px can wash the colour out.

To apply the effect to a block element, you'll need to use the box-shadow property instead of the text-shadow property, but otherwise it's the the same.

For more effects, you could apply opacity to make the text a little see through and see how that works out!

If you find this useful, please check out my portfolio site.

I haven't had the time to work on receeve.it properly for a few weeks, but I am looking to release the following things in the near future:

1. Nike+PHP v0.9.1
2. A mobile poker site (trying some revenue ideas out)
3. Migrating the odd blog post from the old Be Unequaled blog

As you may be aware, Be Unequaled is no longer around as a fashion site, but will return in the future in a different form. I feel that the blog had some decent content so I'll be migrating that over bit by bit to this blog.

Simply type each letter of the alphabet, one at a time and see what URL comes up in your address bar. Post them up and you're taking part in the game!

a: http://angela.sky.com
b: http://www.bbc.co.uk/football
c: http://charanj.it
d: http://digg.com
e: http://expedia.co.uk
f: http://flickr.com
g: http://gmail.com
h: http://hotukdeals.com
i: http://icanhascheezburger.com
j: http://jonquirk.com
k: http://karmaloop.com/index.asp?rcode=CA7004
l: http://liverpoolfc.tv
m: http://maps.google.com
n: http://news.bbc.co.uk
o: http://odeon.co.uk
p: http://picasaweb.google.com
q: //
r: http://reader.google.com
s: http://www.skyarts.co.uk
t: http://twitter.com
u: http://upnextinsports.com
v: http://validator.w3.org/check
w: http://wave.google.com
x: //
y: http://youtube.com
z: //

I took these results from Chrome at work, so the first result was often a well used search term!

I tweeted a few things about my new portfolio and I finally got it up yesterday evening!

I feel that it showcases my talents a lot better than the last version and has a lot more personality! The site is built in HTML5 and uses CSS3, it should degrade nicely down to XHTML and CSS2.

Quite a bit of jQuery, but all unobtrusive. As has become my signature, the site doesn't work in IE6, but I really couldn't care!

Check out charanj.it!

So I am a lover of Nike+ and have had a Nike+ stat widget on the side of my blog for quite a while now. The project can be found at http://nikeplusphp.org.

It came to my attention that the method used wasn't the easiest and certainly wasn't up to date. Looks like something changed on Nike's end and that has broken the API I was using.

Looking around for an alternative, I was inspired to build my own class and am now firmly at version 0.7 with it. I've created a small website for the project where you can grab the code and there's some documentation to help you get started.

The project is called Nike+PHP and all you need is a Nike+ account, PHP5 and SimpleXML installed.

[ read more... ]

I had an issue where I couldn't delete cookies today. Turns out, adding the path works.

<?php
setcookie('name', 'value', time()+3600);
?>

The above would set a cookie for one hour into the future.

<?php
setcookie('name', 'value', time()-3600);
?>

The above should set a cookie for one hour into the past, making it expire and effectively deleting it. Today, this wasn't the case, but adding a path did the trick.

<?php
setcookie('name', 'value', time()+3600, '/');
?>

The above sets it for an hour and for the whole domain. Adding the '/' to both the setting and expiring did the trick!