Playing with Wikipedia

Sometimes I like to write bits of code that poke Wikipedia, its fun and the data is a great way to start a conversation with people. I recently teamed up with the pro wrestling fans of Reddit to find out information on wrestling stables, we did this using the structured Read more…

Installing Unity Remote

I found setting up the Unity remote is easy to do on Android, I expect that the iOS version is a similar easy process. The Unity Remote is found on the play store, there are a couple on there so make sure you get Unity Remote 4, it should be free and developed by Unity Technologies. The play store doesn’t have an approval process and while this is great for developing and deploying apps fast it does has a problem with fake apps, always be carefully when downloading on the play store!

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Visual breakdown of categories on wordpress blogs using R

This is a very simple recipe, just a few lines to get an indication of tags/categories being used on a WordPress site. The idea is that I use R to read the RSS feed of the blog, pick out the tags and categories and display a pie chart of the tags being used. Since tags and categories in wordpress are set by the user it gives you an indication of what subjects the authors think their posts fit in to. It might be a useful script in keyword planning and seo, but I just use it to see how my interests are changing.

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Are we too naive in education?

In my last post I had been thinking about technologies that online communities use and how the technology pushes people to communicate in a certain way. I pushed this out to my Google+ feed, perhaps because Google use plus metrics to an rank article but I would like to think more so because I have friends on there whose feedback I value. When my Google notification button told me I had a comment from Sheila MacNeill I was pleased, not solely because comments will get me some points in Google magic ranking algorithm but more importantly Sheila has a knack for reading through a wall of text, pulling out the important stuff and translating it in to concrete questions. This was Sheila’s comment after reading my post:

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[slideshow][mlg] 46 Learning Analytics Gifs only EdTech People Will Understand

I’m sorry there are no gifs, I understand if you leave now but it will hurt my ‘time on page’ ratings. Please stay a while and pretend to be interested.

Writing what I truly think about a subject on a blog is a difficult process. The first hurdle is the title of the post, which will find itself in the title and heading tags on this page and consequently be used by Google to decide what this page is about and where it should appear in rankings. I get 75% of my traffic from Google so I better make sure I get some juicy up and coming keywords in the title. I also need to make people want to click my link on social media, and the $850 valuation of Buzzfeed tells me lists and reaction gifs is the way to go. After the title I have to think about images for pinterest, keywords for Google, hyperlinks for HITS style algorithms and how this will affect my chances of landing a new job…

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Ric Flair Promotion Jumps

I posted an experiment on a wrestling subreddit a few days where I used DBpedia to explore the links between wrestling stables/ .To my surprise wrestling fans are really interested in the things you can find out using structured data from wikipedia. I was contacted by a graphic  designer asking Read more…

Exploring Wrestling Stables

In pro wrestling a stable is a group of  wrestlers who form an alliance and wrestle together, they help each other out the way typically team mates would, for example by sneaking sledgehammers in to the ring when the referees have their backed turned. When I was younger my favorite Read more…

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