Matt Collins

As I write, my web hosting account has been suspended for “abuse” for a little over 3 hours and counting. It’s the first time this has happened to me, and as I don’t have any real traffic to speak of, it’s an interesting fire drill. I am particularly keen to see how my web hosting [...]

Listier is not the only new creation here at mulogy headquarters. localmouth is a new site I’ve set up over the last week which provides a local community homepage for every village, town and suburb in the UK. The residents of each place can use it to share local information such as details of local [...]

A new site has recently joined the mulogy stable. Listier is a bit of a toy thing for the moment, but it does already do something useful. You can create online lists that are visible to everyone. Other people can then contribute to your lists. This could be useful for collaboration between friends or to [...]

It’s been a few weeks since my last post, so there’s a fair bit to catch up on. I’ll start with what’s been going on with VillageRatings. I spent a while grappling with adding a large database of UK placenames and locations to VillageRatings. This turned out to be quite involved, mainly because the dataset [...]

Taking the usability tips I received yesterday, I’ve spent most of the day updating the VillageRatings site, applying the “low-hanging-fruit” changes. Here’s the new-look version.

At Internet World, the affable and knowledgeable Simon and Alex (I hope I have the names right) from Nomensa and a very nice chap from Cyber-Duck gave me some great advice for VillageRatings (much of which will be generally applicable) that I hope to put to good use in the months to come. Here’s the [...]

I spent today at the Internet World show at Earls Court. Apart from being a good excuse to escape from my trusty laptop for a day, there were a number of interesting talks and even some web usability experts on hand offering some free advice. Out of the presentations I attended, the most interesting tidbits [...]

I’ve just finished adding mapping features to the VillageRatings site. It turns out that displaying maps is relatively easy, thanks to the wonderful Google Maps API. What is tricky (in the UK at least) is computing the right longitude and latitude values for the things you want to display on the map (in this case [...]

How long could I live in Peckham without creating a Peckham-centric web site? Not very long. OK, so PeckhamLive is never going to be big. And it’s not the prettiest site to see the light of day. But it could be useful if you happen to live in Peckham and are looking for local information. [...]

I’ve just re-implemented the VillageRatings site in Rails. The site allows people to read about UK villages and leave their own feedback on them. You can now list villages in order of their ratings for any attribute or overall average rating which wasn’t possible before. And, thanks to Rails, the homepage has been completely overhauled. [...]