Some of my recent (and final) work at the BBC has involved breathing life into old rolodex-style flat databases of content. With my colleague Tom Coates, I’ve been puzzling over how to take a list of text strings like…

Bank Holiday Monday comes around again in a few hours time, and I’m off to BBC Radio 1 to help out on another Ten Hour Takeover show.

UPDATE: related random links and pictures.

XML.com have just published an article I wrote for them last month entitled REST On Rails.

It outlines one approach that I’ve been developing for the API in the BBC programme catalogue. One of the things I like a great deal about Rails is its URL routing and dispatch mechanism…

The XTech 2006 Call For Participation has just been published, and you should be submitting something. You have until January 9th 2006.

XTech is a superb European tech conference covering internet, XML, browser and open data technologies. This year’s conference has…

UPDATE: The BBC Programme Catalogue has launched at https://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax

“The BBC plans to open up its archive to make a treasure trove of material available to everyone.” — BBC Press Release, August 2003

del.icio.us is still giving me food for thought. Here are two toys I’ve made recently: a tag stemming tool that helps you tidy up your tagging using the Porter algorithm, and a (Flash) screen-recorded demo of del.icio.us seamlessly…

I’ll be sad to leave the company of so many informed, intelligent and engaging colleagues (to…

Two conferences are looming large on my radar this week. I’m speaking at Emerging Technology, which happens in San Diego in March, and I’m on the Program Committee for XTech 2005 in Amsterdam in May. Early registration is still open for both conferences (although the O’Reilly one…

I’m on sabbatical, but when an interesting conference like LIFT06 is being organised a bus-ride away from my chalet, I think I have to make an exception. I’ve made my booking — are you going too? Let me know.

Otherwise, see you at XTech — have you got your proposal in yet?

The coding’s done on version 1.0 of the BBC Programme Catalogue and I’ve handed it over to the BBC for testing and deployment. Now I’m going snowboarding. I’ll be living in Morzine in the French Alps until the end of the winter.

I had a great time presenting yesterday evening at the London Web Frameworks night. Huge round of applause to Dean Wilson for putting it together. I learnt interesting things about Catalyst and Django from the other speakers, and did my first public demo of the…