Gary Go, The Script & Take That @ Old Trafford Cricket Ground, Manchester 23/06/09

More photos from the concert

I am proud to announce my latest mashup #ukhols Map is now live!

Last month I was asked by Vodafone UK to create a Twitter mashup to map the UK’s holiday destinations, to promote their Summer Roaming promotion. Based on that original concept, and with additional ideas put in by myself, ukholsmap.com was born!

The map builds on the tweet format used for the #uksnow Map and uses the hashtag #ukhols to collect and map tweets based on contributor’s holiday destination. If contributors include the first half of their home postcode and their destination, the map will draw a line between the two places and tell you how far you are travelling. Visitors to the site can also see the UK’s top 10 holiday destintations, and read individual Tweets on the map.

The site soft-launched 6 days ago and so far has had 6000 visitors and 500 tweets, and has already been featured on many tech sites, including;

http://www.guardian.co.uk/
http://www.mirror.co.uk/
http://www.techradar.com/
http://www.brandrepublic.com/
http://www.pocket-lint.com/
http://creativity-online.com/

Check it out: http://ukholsmap.com

I recently had a problem using PHP’s json_decode() with Twitter’s search API. The Twitpocalypse meant that the tweet status ids were being limited to 2147483647, and in my case, any new tweets weren’t being saved as the app thought they already existed.

To get around the problem of json_decode() limiting ints, I added a regex replace to change large numbers to strings by adding quote marks around them. json_decode() then sees the number as a string and parses it correctly.

An example search function with the fix is shown below:

function TwitterSearch($query) {
  $search_url = 'http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q='.$query;
  $ch = curl_init($search_url);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
  $json = curl_exec($ch);
   
  // -- int-max fix - convert number to string
  $json = ereg_replace('([:])([0-9]{10})([,}])', '\\1"\\2"\\3', $json);
   
  $result = json_decode($json);
  curl_close($ch);
  return $result;
}

The regex here only looks for 10-digit numbers, but this can easily be changed for larger numbers by changing the {10} to say {10,16} to catch 10 to 16 digit numbers.

I’ve been collecting ideas and designs now for a while, with the intention of overhauling my blog - I have a feeling this design is nearly 6 years old.

I’m going to include the usual bits but there will be a social interaction theme to it too

If I had a nasty 90’s animated ‘Under construction’ gif, I’d add it… but thankfully I don’t.