Based on a suggestion in b3ta newsletter #477 I have made LikeFight.co.uk, which works out what is more liked according to Facebook using their Graph API. The results can be a little bit fluffy thanks to Facebook’s search not always giving you exactly what you ask for – for example if you as for Manchester it shall give you Manchester United but that’s not the end of the world.

In the first week since it’s launch LikeFight has had 6,700 views with just over 10,000 comparisons made so hurrah for that.

For the curious the code for LikeFight is available on GitHub.

So a few weeks ago my hosting expired and I was on the lookout for cheap (and ideally free) hosting. My initial plan was to go with Google App Engine and learn a bit of Python along the way. Then a friend suggested Heroku, another cloud based platform with similar sorts usage limits but this time the language of choice was Ruby – a language that I have a passing familiarity with thanks to using it a little at work recently.

The same friend then pointed me at Toto, a tiny file-driven blogging platform and I fell a little in love. This was exactly the kind of thing I’d been musing about for a long time, but was too lazy to build.

I’m not going to promise anything interesting shall appear here but setting up Heroku and Toto have removed what was a big barrier to me publishing things on the net. Now creating a blog post is as easy as writing something in markdown, commiting it to Git and pushing. No more dealing with FTPs and all that. Bliss.

This is a backdated post from way back in the day

Based on a suggestion in b3ta newsletter #419 I have created Tubewhack; a tool that lets you find words whose letters appear in a single tube station name. For instance: Pimlico is the only Underground station which does not contain any of the letters in the word “badger”.

Credit for the name goes to @djmarland as Tubewhack is considerably more succinct than “Words Not Contained In Tube Names”.