Note: With big intent for 2014 I will be moving to a new blog where I can be more focused and share only the big great/painful stuff, it’ll focus on concious self development and will be the future home of this kind of post. Visit WoodyHayday.com for up to date info on this. For now, back to last year:

Books

In 2013 I read 2x more books than in 2012, I’ve been intentionally amping up my reading. 2013 was a fantastic year for inspiration and looking back over the list of titles I’m glad to say that most were solid reads. Autobiographies gave me great inspiration for living and learning, with a smattering of modern thought tethering it all to today. I was initially looking for role models I could gleam advice from, seeking to replicate – but I ultimately found so much more in a lot of these books.

Here’s my 2013 pick, I can’t recommend these enough:

[None of these are affiliate links.]

Talks, Podcasts, Videos, Music

Glad to have found all of these. Thanks to the friends who’ve shared links and the authors that have lead me to find them. The Joe Rogan Experience podcast is the most coherent thing to my vision of my own existence I have found all year, props to Joe for having rational conversations that tip the balance to positive. Add Akala & Low Key to the mix and I see a future.

• Seth Godin Q & A
• Graham Hancock – The War on Conciousness (Banned TED talk)
• The Pretotyping Manifesto
• Chris Sacca Interview
• Tim Ferriss on London Real (and this post made me smile)
• Akala – Another Reason & Low Key – My Soul
• Joe Rogan Experience Podcast, notably:
  • Lorenzo Hagerty – http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/lorenzo-hagerty
  • Graham Hancock – http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/graham-hancock-2
  • Dave Asprey – http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/dave-asprey
  • Steven Pressfield – http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/steven-pressfield-aubrey-marcus
  • Stefan Molyneux – http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/stefan-molyneux

Akala – Find No Enemy

Projects

2013 was a full year of “work”. I consulted for ~3 months, building several WordPress plugins and a few web app prototypes, after which I became CTO at SAM, building the MVP there. Towards the close of the year I’ve now reset my goals and started working on the future of StormGate and Woody Hayday, in business terms (I’m looking for software problems to fix & finishing my novel!)

Social Gallery – Social Gallery moved in to the Epic Plugins.com suite of WordPress plugins, it’s since gone on to continue to sell well and is constantly in the “top sellers this week” section on CodeCanyon. It’s now beaten 2k sales and is on its way to 3k.

SAM – Social Asset Management (samdesk.io) – I joined SAM as CTO in March 2013 at inception stage and spent six months building the first MVP. SAM is a platform for media professionals to find and manage Social Assets (tweets, instagram photos etc.) in a modern, coherent way. It’s at the leading edge of innovation in the market and I’m glad I took it to MVP. I got to stretch my legs with almost all of AWS, and up to date JS. I moved on from SAM in October but I am confident it’s going to be a big success, definitely one to watch. James (CEO/Co Founder) continues to be an inspiration.

Writing/Other/Futures – In the last part of 2013 I began experimenting with a few options. I started working towards releasing my sci-fi novel in 2014 (perhaps August – click here to get notified), but for bread and butter I’ve been working on some software projects (SaaS for freelancers, authors and many other ideas!). I also finalised a joint venture that will begin in January. I’m keen to keep a fairly open field until I find something which matches my desired conditions.

Travel

We didn’t intend to travel that much in 2013, what with moving house, twice. We started in Belgium, moved back to Hertfordshire and still fitted in West Wales, Edinburgh, Dunfermline (Carnegie!) Great Yarmouth, Amsterdam (IBC2013) and finished the year in Romania. I couldn’t think of a better place to spend some time than Sinai with good friends! Now we are back in the home counties we are having lots of great evenings out in London and a few good talks too, it was a highlight of 2013 to go to four Akala gigs, his last featuring Low Key especially.

Time Management

In 2012 I started logging time I spend on a computer against projects. This was in part for consultancy billing but developed into a total analysis of my time spent. In 2013 I logged every minute I spent at a computer, tagging the time against a project (I used Toggl, which is excellent.) The process was interesting, as are the results. Doing this is definitely a solid step towards efficacy in your everyday life.

Time logged: 2871 Hours 54 Minutes

Or: Average 55 hours a week / 8 hours a day!

Here’s the distribution of my time – the big blue section is SAM, the other projects seem to share out quite evenly!

• Email took up way less time than I had expected, totalling around 53 hours (just over an hour a week!) – I had been purposely lean on this in 2013, trying to avoid all “busy work”. Success.
• “Lunch Reading” took up a bigger chunk than I had expected, though was still less than most people traditionally spend on lunch breaks.
• I spent more time in the gym than I remembered!
• I spent less than 100 hours playing computer games (Command and Conquer, Battlefield) – Again I was trying to keep lean here.
• Several little projects produced fantastic returns per hour overall. I wonder how this scales.

2013 Summary

The post 2013 Annual Review first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

Facebook-Style Photo Viewer – Social Gallery

Social Gallery is a WordPress plugin which adds a fancy “Facebook-style” photo viewer to your blog images. It’s a bit of an improvement on the existing lightbox plugins which have served their time well but really haven’t been innovated in too long. This WordPress plugin came about through the combined timing of a client requirement and a schedule collapse, but the end product has ended up working out quite nicely (you can see it in effect by clicking the image below.)

Click this:

(Photo is one of mine I found lying about in WordPress – Aberaeron, West Wales)

What your seeing is version 1.0, you can see the full website here and buy it for $14 here. Future versions will have some fancy additions such as Disqus comments (as well as Facebook comments) and more clever ways to feed content into its sidebar.

Social Gallery rides off the wave that is Facebook, using a similar photo-viewing style to give your users a better media experience as well as garnering the benefits of association with Facebook. If you think about it 900+ million users will be familiar with this way of viewing images so it makes sense for more of us to adopt it, Social Gallery is a really easy way to add this functionality to your WordPress.

Features:

• Facebook-style lightbox
• Get More Likes & More Shares
• Get More Comments
• Engage your Visitors
• Adds Facebook Comments
• Familiar to Facebook’s 900+ million users
• Easy to Install

If you want to know more just hop over to SocialGalleryPlugin.com

The post Facebook-Style Photo Viewer WordPress Plugin first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

Javascript – Using JS to find Browser Country / Location not from IP Photo by ToastyKen

Common solutions to identifying a users locale/localizing/localising a web client:

Using PHP / ASP.NET take the users IP and feed into an ip to location service (geo ip) to find a country from ip.
Pro’s: Server-side off the bat, can cache a database of IP’s (although would you?)
Con’s: Adds another 2 hops to at least initial page load, IP location service’s can cost or be faulty

Using the request headers (again server-side) to identify an “accepted language” and then guestimating their location (taking en-US…for example.)
Pro’s: Server-side to start with, no extra hops/calls required, this data is already available whether you use it or not, more useful for language (although limited)
Con’s: Unreliable – mostly because of a few of the BIG browsers default to en-US for all english users, often international users might learn to use a browser in English anyway – defeating the point

Another solution (work in progress:)

A step towards a proper solution, and in my case a solution for MY original problem, is to at least work out their TIMEZONE. What? I hear you say, why the timezone? Well if you know, for example using analytics data, that your user base is 40% US, 50% UK and 10% rest of the world you can at least make a START by dealing with the two major constituents of your audience. I can envisage A more complete solution though, by combining the use of request headers accepted language AND the following Javascript timezone detection:

Searching around a bit I found this which showed a lot of promise. This javascript works out the users Operating System time offset, and from that you can define which timezone they are in. Useful, if like me you know your users in a specific timezone are likely to be in one country, not particularly if they are possibly in multiple countries within a timezone.

A solution / exploration – location detection in javascript

The following Javascript gives you both indicators, using navigator.language/systemlanguage it detects the browser’s language, and then using an expanded upon version of the above script it will provide you with the possible countries from the users OS timezone offset. How useful this is to you is depending on the application, but check it out – build some fantastic solution off of it, then show me, because I probably won’t get round to it!

var langCode = navigator.language || navigator.systemLanguage;
var lang = langCode.toLowerCase(); lang = lang.substr(0,2);

var dateObject = new Date(); //this timezone offset calc taken from http://unmissabletokyo.com/country-detector.html
var timeOffset = - dateObject.getTimezoneOffset() / 60; 
var c = ""; //this will ultimately end up as a country/csv of possible countries
switch (timeOffset) { //I expanded upon this switch, adding all the possible countries
	case 0: 
	 c = 'Algeria, Ascension Island, Burkina Faso, Faeroe Islands, Ghana, Guinea Republic, Iceland, Ireland, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Morocco, Sao Tome & Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, St Helena, The Gambia, Togo, United Kingdom'; break;
	
	case 1: 
	 c = 'Albania, Andorra, Angola, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Benin, Bosnia, Cameroon, Central Africa Republic, Chad, Congo, Croatia, Czech Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire), Denmark, Equatorial Guinea, France, Gabon, Germany, Gibraltar, Guam, Hungary, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Macedonia (Fyrom), Malta, Mariana Islands, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Monaco, Netherlands, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Papua New Guinea, Poland, Portugal, San Marino, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia'; break;
	 
	case -1: 
	 c = 'Cape Verde Islands, Cook Islands, French Polynesia, Guinea Bissau, USA'; break;
	 
	case 11:	
	 c = 'New Caledonia, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu'; break;
	 
	case -11:
	 c = 'Niue Island, Samoa (American), Samoa (Western), USA'; break;
	 
	case 11.5:
	 c = 'Norfolk Island'; break;
	 
	case 12:	
	 c = 'Fiji Islands, Kiribati, Nauru, New Zealand, Tuvalu, Wallis & Futuna Islands'; break;
	 
	case 13:
	 c = 'Tonga'; break;
	 
	case 2:	
	 c = 'Botswana, Bulgaria, Burundi, Cyprus, Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire), Egypt, Finland, Greece, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Lesotho, Libya, Lithuania, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Palestine, Romania, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Syria, Turkey, Zambia, Zimbabwe'; break;
	 
	case 3:
	 c = 'Bahrain, Belarus, Comoros Island, Djibouti, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Kenya, Kuwait, latvia, Madagascar, Mayotte Islands, Moldova, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda, Ukraine, Yemen Arab Republic'; break;
	 
	case -3:
	 c = 'Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Greenland, Guyana, Uruguay'; break;
	
	case 3.5:
	 c = 'Iran'; break;
	
	case -3.5:
	 c = 'Surinam'; break;
	
	case 4:
	 c = 'Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Mauritius, Oman, Reunion Island, Seychelles, United Arab Emirates'; break;
	
	case -4:
	 c = 'Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Barbados, Bermuda, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Dominica Islands, Dominican Republic, Falkland Islands, French Guiana , Grenada, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Montserrat, Netherlands Antilles, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, St Kitts & Nevia, St Lucia, Trinidad & Tobago, Venezuela'; break;
	
	case 5:
	 c = 'Diego Garcia, Maldives Republic, Pakistan, Turkmenistan'; break;
	
	case -5:
	 c = 'Bahamas, Brazil, Canada, Cayman Islands, Columbia, Ecuador, Haiti, Jamaica, Panama, Peru, Turks & Caicos Islands, USA'; break;
	
	case 5.5:
	 c = 'Bhutan,India,Nepal,Sri Lanka'; break;
	
	case 6:
	 c = 'Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan'; break;
	
	case -6:
	 c = 'Belize, Canada, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, USA'; break;
	
	case 6.5:
	 c = 'Myanmar (Burma)'; break;
	
	case 7:
	 c = 'Australia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam'; break;
	
	case -7:
	 c = 'Canada, Mexico, USA'; break;
	
	case 8:
	 c = 'Australia, Brunei, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Macau, Malaysia, Mongolia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan'; break;
	
	case -8:
	 c = 'Canada, Mexico, USA'; break;
	
	case 9:
	 c = 'Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, North, Korea, South, Palau'; break;
	
	case -9:
	 c = 'USA'; break;
}

//at this point Lang should be a 2 letter language code (e.g. en), timeOffset will be the users hour offset from GMT and c will be the csv of possible countries!
alert('Lang: ' + lang + "\r\n" + 'timeOffset: ' + timeOffset + "\r\n" + 'Possible Countries: ' + "\r\n" + c);

You can get the full source for this zipped here, included is a minified version wrapped in a function, isn’t that nice of me? Use it as you will, and if you create something epic, show me!

Countries/timezones: I built the timezone offset switch based on the wikipedia list of countries and their timezones, so its comprehensive.

The post IP to Location Alternative: Javascript – Using JS to find Browser Country / Location not from IP first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

Irritating when the thing looks so pretty out of the box. So rather than opt for one of the non-pretty options I just hacked it. Brutally I just added code to maintain an input as a csv, it needs fixing really but this does work, for now.

Click here to download my hack/fixed version which maintains a separate csv (in a designated ID – search replace “csvHolder” if you want to change its ID.)

Hopefully Drew can update his plugin so it works out of the box, its a really useful plugin.

Note: This rar includes my csv quick maintaining functions which are required.

The post Fix/Hack to make AutoSuggest JQuery Plugin work first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

Using the below you can add/remove items to an input which acts as a csv holder, should be self explanatory, get and set are just shorteners.

function get(a){ //small get
	if (typeof a != "undefined") {
		return document.getElementById(a).value;
	} else { 
		return '';
	}
}

function set(i,v){ //small set
	document.getElementById(i).value = v;	
}

function append(i,v){ //small append
	set(i,get(i) + v);		
}

function appendTocsv(i,v){ //small append csv
	if (get(i).length == 0){
		set(i,v);	
	} else { 
		append(i,', ' + v);
	}
}

function incsv(id,v){ //check a csv (in element with id) for a value (v)
	
	var csv = get(id);
	var csvArray = csv.split(', ');
	var found = false;
	
	if (csvArray.length > 0){
		
		for (i = 0; i <= csvArray.length; i++){
		
			if (csvArray[i] == v){ found = true;  }
			
		}
		
	}
	
	return found;
		
}

function removeFromcsv(id,v){ //removes a val from csv
	
	var csv = get(id);
	var csvArray = csv.split(', ');
	var removed = false;
	var endString = "";
	
	if (csvArray.length > 0){
		
		for (i = 0; i <= csvArray.length-1; i++){
		
				
			if (csvArray[i] == v){ removed = true;  } else { 
			
				if (endString.length > 0){ endString += ', '; } 
				endString += csvArray[i]; 
			
			}
			
		}
		
	}
	
	set(id,endString);
	
	return removed;
	
}

The post Maintain a CSV with Javascript – keep a hidden list first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

The JQuery documentation for this doesn’t account for the reality of the above, its all very well if you want the empty column/div to SHOW all the time as empty, that is remain as some sort of visible placeholder, but if the empty list should show as empty, until an object is ready to be dropped on it then JQuery sortable’s don’t work. It all comes down to dimensions, if an empty list exists without a height value, you can’t drop onto it.

More specifically, if an empty jquery-sortable list exists without a specific height set at the point of [.sortable start] (that is BEFORE the event is fired) then you just cannot drop the sortable.

Image by Dmitry Baranovskiy

I played with fixing this by adjusting each empty list (in the example belows case #col1,#col2,#col3) to have a defined height (and background, which looks nice) within the sortable “start” option, but this just creates boxes (or landing pads/zones) you can see, but not drop on.

Long and short of it – the solution to being able to drop jquery sortable’s onto invisible empty lists is to bind a function which adds a css class (or sets the height specifically) to the empty (invisible) sortable list when a user clicks one of the goal objects. This is then fired BEFORE the sortable takes hold and so creates drag-droppable landing zones for the users held sortable. It then uses the sortables “stop” property to remove the class it has added to any columns which have it.

function sortAndDrag() {
    
	//show BEFORE sortable starts
     $("#col1, #col2, #col3").bind('click mousedown', function(){
          $(".col").each(function (c) {
                if ($("div", this).size() == 0) {
                    $(this).addClass("colZoneEmpty")
                }
            })
     });
    
	//enable sortable
    $("#col1, #col2, #col3").sortable({
        revert: true,
        connectWith: ".col",
        stop: function (a, d) {
            $(".col").removeClass("colZoneEmpty");
	    //any ajax processing
        }
    });
	
}
//in this example 3 column div's exist with the id's 'col1','col2','col3', all of which have the class 'col' 
//colZoneEmpty is a css class which makes the empty list visible

There are of course improvements you could make here, like checking the users dragging before setting any styling, but this quick hackaround works where it shouldn’t.

The post Unable to drop JQuery sortable onto empty list? Hack solution first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

var newBGString = $(this).css('background-image');

…it does, but not in firefox. Say the background property was set to “url(someimage.png) top left no-repeat”, making the background-image property “url(someimage.png)” right? In every browser except firefox, yes, not for firefox. Firefox would set the var as “url(“someimage.png”)” and THEN complain that the var is not realistic when you go on to use it elsewhere.

Anyway ridiculous bug, almost as annoying is how simple, hacky and rough the fix is:

var newBGString = $(this).css('background-image').replace('"',''); 

So if your firefox doesn’t like background image swapping via js, try it, I guess…

The post Firefox, why you mutate my css? first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

So if your in the same boat and you have hundreds (thousands?) of RSS urls hard-coded into files across multiple servers I would recommend you get working, perhaps the following will be of use. I should mention at this point that Auction 2 Post users (and Bans, Wordbay etc.) will not suffer any fallout as they use the shopping api (which is sensible now, but back in 2006 wasn’t an accessible option.)

I have written a quick transformation script (js) which will take an old epn RSS url (http://rss.api.ebay.com/ws/rssapi?…) and transform it into a new one (http://rest.ebay.com/epn/v1/find/item.rss?…), if you only have a few urls to change over then it might be enough for you:

If you have a LOT of these urls in files (like I do) then you might want to use something a little more automated. In my case I wrote a complete FTP spider which flies for each and every file hunting for old ebay RSS urls, transforming them and updating the pages. This was fine in my case because mine were pretty standardly laid out, similar use etc. I wouldn’t recommend it if you use the extremity of the RSS parameters.

Anyhow as the FTP crawler was pretty huge of a code puke, I might release that separately at some point (it has other good uses ;)), here is the csharp for transforming old RSS urls into new ones though (Note: it doesnt deal with all the parameters, only the most common/ones I use regularly, it may need tailoring.)

static string transformEPNRSSUrl(string inputUrl)
{
    string transformed = "http://rest.ebay.com/epn/v1/find/item.rss?";

    //split url by ?
    string[] splitUrl = inputUrl.Split(new char[] { '?' });

    //split second by &
    string[] splitParams = splitUrl[1].Split(new char[] { '&' });

    //new params
    string newParams = "";

    //transform params
    foreach (string s in splitParams)
    {
        string retID = "";
        string retVal = "";
        string[] sV = s.Split(new char[] { '=' });

        //mostly :p
        retVal = sV[1];

        //see if tis required
        if (sV[0] == "sacat") { retID = "categoryId1"; }
        if (sV[0] == "satitle") { retID = "keyword"; }
        if (sV[0] == "afepn") { retID = "campaignid"; }
        if (sV[0] == "customid") { retID = "customid"; }
        if (sV[0] == "saprclo") { retID = "minPrice"; }
        if (sV[0] == "saprchi") { retID = "maxPrice"; }
	
        if (retID != "")
        {
            if (newParams != "") { newParams += "&"; } //for all but first
            newParams += retID + "=" + retVal;
        }

        //last few additions 24/06/2011
        if (sV[0] == "fts" && sV[1] == "2") { newParams += "descriptionSearch=true"; }
        if (sV[0] == "sascs" && sV[1] == "2") { newParams += "listingType1=AuctionWithBIN&listingType2=FixedPrice"; }

    }

    transformed += newParams;
    //following is some defaults for me, check these yourself, use:
    //http://woodylabs.com/scripts/ebay-epn-rss-url-converter.php
    transformed += "&sortOrder=EndTimeSoonest&programid=15&toolid=10039&listingType1=All&lgeo=1&feedType=rss";

    return transformed;
}

Use both the transformer script page and the csharp code at your own peril, it worked for me over hundreds of urls, mostly without a hitch, but thats not saying it will for you. Check your urls, after all each is probably worth £ to you. Visit the RSS urls and use the ebay tool validator to check the RSS feed has worked!

Just a quick mention of the positives of ebay deciding to rip out the old system (its not all a pain in the arse!):

• It reminded me how widespread my old ebay affiliate sites are, it was a good excuse to take stock and write FTPCrawler
• The whole system is much cleaner, parameter wise
• The introduction of multiple selection parameters is useful
• The new RSS generator is nice (as much as anyone uses the thing

The post Ebay Partner Network Changes RSS Urls (again) first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

The post Grab Tabs – Get chromium urls in a list first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

I can see applications ranging from replacing my SEO QUAKE’s list parameter check to many many web marketing, analytics, data crawling and recording processes, all of which you could do in ms.excel, yet more accessible here. This isn’t a big deal, but landed on my lap this morning so here’s the share

The post Javascript in Spreadsheets? – Google Apps Script Does that first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.