mrben.co.uk

Shall I Go To The Pub?

April 21, 2011

Last Friday someone asked "shall we go to the pub?" I thought it was a great idea, but as I feel I've lost my own identity and become a conduit for the Internet I thought I should check with it first.

Whacking shalligotothepub.com into my browser I was shocked to find no answer. I couldn't possibly go to the pub without the Internet sanctioning it, so Pawel and I spent 20 minutes creating shalligotothepub.com.

It was done for our own amusement, but after Patrick submitted it to StumbleUpon the hits started rolling in, and in, and in. Thousands and thousands of visits within a couple of hours was NOT what we were expecting! (So we quickly stuck a Facebook Like button on there.) And they continued. Over 11k on the first day, and half that on the next. Monday and Tuesday saw an unexpected resurgence in people wanting to go to the pub with the Internet's permission. Tuesday being the busiest say yet with 11.5k visits.

We've had around 40k unique visitors, over 2k Facebook Likes and 56k page views. Over 75% of traffic came from StumbleUpon and 8% from Facebook. Overwhelmingly out visitors choose Firefox and Chrome to browser the web - perhaps the high Firefox percentage is linked to the handy StumbleUpon plugin.

This has certainly been an interesting lesson.

Categories: Fun

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What's the world listening to?

July 8, 2010

A while back I crafted a Processing sketch that displayed a map of the world and popped up the most popular artist for the country the mouse was hovering over. Bored last night, I decided to give the newish Google Maps API a whirl and see if I could recreate the sketch for the web.

It uses fxb's javascript-last.fm-api library which made the artist lookup incredibly easy. The whole thing took no more than 2 hours.

Categories: Fun, Programming, Visualization

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Processing.js - Playing with particles and transitions

June 9, 2010

After having used having used Processing on and off for a couple of years I decided it was time to have a play with Processing.js. Heavily inspired by this I decided to have a play. This is my current "train-project" to keep me busy on my crazy daily commute - expect lots of changes and hopefully some polish sometime soon.

Oh, you'll need a decent and recent browser (Chrome or Firefox - unfortunately this doesn't work with Safari).

Categories: Fun, Processing

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Let's get ghetto [Arduino styleee]

Sept. 28, 2009

Over the weekend I went to an 80s themed fancy dress party. A few days before I visited Affleck's Palace in Manchester for some inspiration and saw some old skool ghetto blasters. I thought it'd be brilliant to buy one and go as a Beastie Boy, but these things were expensive. Especially the one with loads of flashing LEDs! I thought "Hang on, I can hack one together using my Arduino kit, and a cardboard box!".

So I did.

There's a really rough and ready tutorial over at Instructables and a photo album on Facebook. The code is on Github, and whilst not brilliant, does the job. Oh, there's also a video on Vimeo (it's also embedded below).

Categories: Arduino, Fun

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