Phil Leggetter - Software Consultant

To make a cross domain web request with SilverLight 2 really isn’t that tough. I did have some problems with RC0 but I have no idea why. I just tried writing a little app to do this and it worked straight away.
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Here’s a link to a very useful tool that’ll download the latest Google Chrome (well Chromium) nightly build. I decided to use this due to the vertical scrolling issue with Google Chrome that was driving me mad. The bug was present in the release of Google Chrome but fixed in the nightly builds.

Chromium Nightly Downloader

Update: 02/10/2008

I’ve been looking into getting SilverLight to work with Google Chrome or Chromium and came across a post about something called Chrome Channel Switcher which looks like it automatically updates your Chrome install to either Beta or Development builds. Could be useful! There are links directly to the executable download from Jon Galloway’s blog post.

Google is slowly moving away from its simple basic colour look to a new - but still simple - Web 2.0 look.

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Rob of GIS Consultancy fame recently sent me a link to a website dedicated to tracking and fixing of neighbourhood problems. The Neighbourhood Fix It website is a great idea and it actually works. I reported the dumping of a load of newspapers and leaflets outside of our flat that were just waiting to be set on fire. That same day the Edinburgh “Rapid Response Team” had been out and picked up the papers and leaflets.

Neighbourhood Fix It must have a mapping of post codes to councils and automatically inform the council of any reports in their jurisdiction. The site has been developed by mySociety who aim to “give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives”. I think that Neighbourhood Fix It is a great piece of work and a great example.

Read more on the launch of Neighbourhood Fix It.

With the reasonable success of Bring Back Beckham! I decided to push forward with my next project. The idea behind England Goals was to create a site that lists all the goals scored by the England football team and use the increase in the number of goals that can be found on external video sites to my advantage by embedding these user uploaded videos as content.

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Back in October 2006 I had an idea for a website. I tend to come up with a variety of ideas for things, most of which I add a .com to the end of. This time my idea was based around the fact that the England football team were in terrible form having drawn 0-0 with Macedonia and that Steve McClaren, the England manager, was refusing to pick England’s, and the world’s, most recognised footballer, David Beckham.

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Mapping APIs have been around for ages now and all the big guns (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) have thrown their hat into the ring.  You can even get a Google maps plugin for wordpress plugin to allow you to easily put a map in your blog.

Wow, it’s Edinburgh

There’s even an API that allows you to switch between using all three - but it doesn’t look like it’s been updated in quite a while.

All these examples exploded onto the scene but haven’t really made any major advances, that my naked eye can see, for quite a while. Why is this? Is it that they are as good as they can possibly get? Or is development stagnant for another reason? Maybe it’s lack of data! Whilst people are forever creating mashups of this on top of that with a little bit of the other thrown in the unfortunate thing for me is that there hasn’t really been anything that has blown my mind since the very early days of DHTML maps. Somebody please prove me wrong!

Maybe it’s time for the OS to start setting the data free so that people can actually benefit from the high quality data without paying through the nose - then maybe we’ll see some great UK mashups.

I came a across a fun little tool that estimates what your domain is worth. Microsoft.com was worth over $24,000,000 but Leggetter.co.uk was only worth only $36!

Give it a go and see how much your domain comes in at.