We've done this little Flash zoetrope for a Topshop Christmas campaign site.

It's really quite interesting the way we got the whole thing to work. As you know, a zoetrope works by getting it to spin at the right speed for a strob light to hit each 'frame' at the exact same place. This makes it look like it's animated (same idea as a film projector). We achieved the same effect in Flash by having the movie skip a certain number of frames as it speeds up. I don't know if that makes any sense really it's hard to explain. Go and have a look at the final thing here: Topshop Christmas Fairy tale.

Nice work on the movie by Jason and illustrations and flash work by Nicky, Vasco and Caroline.

Freshbooks is an awesome tool for managing all the boring bits when it comes to freelance work. It does Time tracking, Invoices and keeps track of your VAT and stuff as well. Basically all the things you don't want to spend your energy on, Freshbook does for you.

Thanks to a competition on Jacob Gube's blog Six Revisions I got a free subscription for a year, and I can't tell you how sweet this app seems to be.

Thank you Jacob and the Freshbooks team!

Getting your Youtube, Qik, Vimeo etc files into blogs and discussion boards is not always a walk in the park. You normally have to find a object tag for embedding the file or when it comes to images you need to get hold of the actual image files URL and wrap it in an img tag.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could just copy and paste the URL you find in the address bar of Youtube or Flickr?

oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly.

eEmbed has been created to help out with this. It's an open standard for requesting the correct embed code for a given URL. Basically what this would look like for the end user is that you write your text and where you want an image or video you simply paste the URL for the particular web page into the text.

On the server side we make a call to the media host's oEmbed API and ask for the correct way of embedding the particular media URL and then we display it for the user.

Example user input:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattiasgunneras/2717919854/

Output after oEmbed lookup at Flickr:

<img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3127/2717919854_a7d5b2325e.jpg?v=0" alt="boat plane" />

Read More:

• oEmbed Specifications
• Get started with oEmbed - Webmonkey
• oEmbed for Django

So today was the Developer Day at Wembly Arean. There was a few good talks, but nothing really ground breaking. I kind of hoped they would talk a little more about innovation and where google is going the future with their services like Gears and App Engine. Instead it was pretty much demonstrations of how the google products work and how we can use them. Basically stuff we already know. Maybe I had my expectations set a little high but all in all, it was a very good day.

I regret I missed Dion Almaer's talk on AJAX. Highlights though were Kevin Marks talking about open social and viral vs organic growth.

If you behave like a disease, people will develop a imune system.

The Javascript APIs for geolocation information via Gears is also very interesting. I can't wait for this stuff to properly come to the mobile devices! Btw we were demoed a handset running Android, which kind of left me wanting to go buy the Iphone.

A bonus. The angry green man USB stick freebee.

Freebase is a bit like Wikipedia only with added semantics and concepts of context rather then just free floating words. When we search Google we search for documents containing a particular word of phrase. With Freebase on the other hand, you search documents on what they actually are about, rather then what they might happen to contain. Freebase Parallax is a new UI built on top of the Freebase database, and it is awesome. It's a faceted browser that with filters let's you drill down to the data you're interested in. And the really cool thing is that it let's you plot your data on top of a time graph or google maps. It's not really like the amazing graphs of Hans Rosling but definitely a step in the right direction.

Above is a graph rendering US presidents birth location. You can also embed live diagrams. Here's the same presidents birth date plotted on a time scale:

It's time again for A List Apart's Survey for people who make websites. They started this in 2007 and I really liked the findings they did then.

I never really saw the point of podcasts up until very recently. I kind of saw them as always outdated amateur radio shows. But I've actually started listening to a few now and I quite like it. So here's some of the geeky stuff I've got on my iPod.

Audible Ajax

Lots of web talk and trends. From the guys at ajaxian.com.

Jeff and Casey

Two game developers that talk about musicals, cars, microsoft and internet porn. It's funny and silly.

Pragmatic Podcast

Software development from Pragmatic Programmers with lots of interviews.

StackOverflow

Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky creates a programming community and talks about it and lots of other things.

Software Engineering Radio

Pretty hard core computer sciency stuff.

TEDTalks

Brilliant and random talks about technology, entertainment and design.

For the past couple of months I've been working on this crazy balloon race across the internet, and the stuff's just gone live over at playballoonacy.com. Basically what we're trying to do is to fly a bunch of balloons over a set route of internet sites. If you push your balloon around you can pick up little prize tokens which puts you in a daily prize draw pool. And if you're really diligent about your ballooing and you manage to push it the furthest during the 7 day balloon bonanza, you will win a trip to Ibiza for you and your friends.

The actual race starts Monday 23rd June and I can't wait!