I've been spending much more time on site development than content creation in recent months. Rest assured that there has been plenty going on behind the scenes and I am looking forward to the next release. But what's the point in having a site if there is nothing on it to read?

So to celebrate the release of the new Bond movie "Quantum of Solace" here is a new list to determine our favourite Bond movie villain!

Ultimate Bond Baddie

The Bond series of films based on Ian Flemmings novels have been the most succesful movie series of all time. No other has had so many sequels with each new film as anticipated as the last. I would say that they manage to get better and better. James Bond is not the only star of the show, there are also the fabulous locations, the creative gadgets, the Bond girls (another list for sure!), and of course the bad guys (and girls!).

So now here is your opportunity to pick your favourite Bond villain!

Anyone else been watching the new series of x-factor? I always say I'll never watch these shows ever again, afterall its just an excuse for simon cowell and his friends to make lots of cash. Good luck to them I say! Anyways, this year I've actually thought the standard of contestants has been much higher than past x-factor years. The singing and song selection seems vastly improved. Not all that hard one might argue!

So it seems another great list opportunity is here - who is the all time greatest x-factor singer. Perhaps a cross series vote might be quite interesting? Or even on a series by series basis. I will have a think about entering such a list but in the mean time I think my favourite x-factor contestant is Diana Vickers. Arguably one of the better singers in there and one of the first performers on the show to actually show some individuality. The trouble is, I suspect she may be better than the show itself and this may not be the best platform to get noticed.

Who knows, time will tell!

YouTube feeds and e107

A while ago I posted about working on integrating feeds into e107, beginning with the Amazon API. I have yet to progress my work with Amazon web services, however I have been experimenting with adding new feeds into my e107 affiliate plugin. Youtube has always provided an API to allow development against their content but in the post Google phase this has really taken off.

The ultimate goal will be to add YouTube driven uploads and content directly into wistop.com. But for now I have created a small shortcode to simply display and play the video!




The shortcode accepts a single parameter - the video code that we all know and love. It then passes this code over to the affiliate plugin which goes away, gets the details, and then maps this to the template.

e107 YouTube BBCode:



Scriptaculous

The other exciting part of this excerise is the opportunity to experiment with scriptaculous. This is a handy set of functions that very very easily enables web developers to add flashy ajax style effects to their website. The chaps over at the e107 free source site have already integrated the scripts into their plugins. Initially with their lightbox plugin and a more robust solution was introduced with their widgets plugin. In due course I will be upgrading this site to make use of this.

Now you see it, now you don't!

Replacing the thumbnail with the full video became very easy thanks to the appear function.




The advantage of this over the e107 expandit() function is that it allows full control over which elements you wish to show and which you wish to hide. So one click hides the thumbnail and shows the video.

Web 2.0 Ajax and e107

Having seen how easy it is to use the functions of scriptaculous I am now starting to think about all the different uses for it around the wistop.com site or e107 plugins. It is also exciting to know that close integration with these scripts is on the e107 roadmap thus ensuring full support in the long awaited e107 0.8 release.

Rest assured, any cool new ideas, hints and tips will be documented in our blog.

A few updates have been pushed out to the live site to improve stability. A couple of layout bugs have been vanquished with some quick CSS hacking, although the blog posts now need a little spacing out! I have also rolled out the new version of e107 tagcloud. The latest batch of improvements mean that I no longer need any custom code to have tags working on this site the way I want them which is good news! I just need to fix my Google Chrome rendering issues and then I can move on to some functional updates and more importantly, some content creation!

With some excitement I have had the opportunity to add a new item to the
top browser list! Welcome to Chrome! News of the biggest shake up of the browser wars for some time started mounting over the last couple of days with rumours of Google's activity stirring. Things then moved quickly with an official announcement followed by the Beta release of Chrome yesterday evening here in UK!

I have now installed it and am typing in a Chrome window as we speak! Initial reaction to the look and feel is positive and I'm looking forward to exploring all the new features. The wistop Chrome entry will be updated in due course with the features that might persuade you to switch browser!