Recently, with the guiding hands of Steven Troughton-Smith and James Padolsey, I’ve been dipping my toe into the ocean known as Mac OS X app development. I’m a complete and utter newbie to computer programming, but I have a great idea (or at least an improvement on an existing idea) so I’m delving into the unknown territory to see what happens.

Grab Up was a fantastic application for Mac OS X (a promised Windows version has still, after 6 months, failed to arrive) that allowed users to take a screenshot on their computer and have it automatically upload to the web, eventually leaving a URL of the image in the user’s clipboard. It’s supposed to be simple and easy to use. So why am I writing in the past tense?

Towards the end of 2008, Grab Up was acquired from its original developer. Since the acquisition the service that Grab Up provides has declined significantly. The new owner has switched hosting accounts a total of 3 times since the start of the year, meaning all previous grabs have been lost. The domain expired, was bought buy a squatter and all of this went unnoticed until someone tweeted to the new Grab Up owner. The service is frequently down, goes over their bandwidth allocation and can be more hassle than it’s actually worth. The URLs that Grab Up provides are long winded and unnecessary. Grab Up seems to be dying a slow and very painful death.

As I’m sure you’re aware, this leaves a fantastic gap in the market for a competitor. Step into the spotlight TinyGrab. Keyone Productions, the company of which I’m a founding partner in, is putting the facilities in place to create a fantastic image uploading and hosting service. For various reasons I can’t go into too much detail about the plans for TinyGrab, but keep your eyes on TinyGrab.com and this blog for exciting news soon.

Chris Leydon.

Recently I’ve spent a lot of time working on my new online portfolio. Back in Nobember I bought the domain name chrisleydon.tv with the intent of turning it into an entertainment channel. A channel that would have been full of blogs, video shows and short films. Whilst this is a long term dream, something I want Keyone Productions to be able to achieve, I realised that it wasn’t something that was plausable for chrisleydon.tv at the present time.

An online entertainment channel requires constant updating with fresh content. It requires time and love, two things which I can’t give to such a project at this current moment in time. I needed to come up with another use for my domain.

Over the past two months and the holiday season, many ideas and concepts have come and gone. The concept that I settled on was to turn chrisleydon.tv into a place for my portfolio. I could have done this through a page on my blog, but I decided that it was wise to have a completely seperate and independant site for this project.

The design of the portfolio was something that was crucial. I wanted as much space as possible for a widescreen flash video player, but I also wanted incredible ease of use. After a few mockups in Photoshop I settled on the final design that is currently being used, the next step was to code the site.

I’ve dabbled with web design and coding in the past, as regular blog readers will know, however this is my most ambitious web project to date. To save on loading pages I wanted everything to be on one page. For accessibility reasons I didn’t want the entire site to be flash based. I required a system whereby the user click on a video to play and it plays in the central video player. From past experiences I knew that this was plausable with little hard work. Such a system is put into use on the Mevio website, as well as the new Podzone site (coded by Owen Jones).

The problem with using the systems from Mevio and The Podzone is that both of those sites run off a content management system, something which I didn’t want to use. As I’m not the most fantastic coder in the world I needed a little help with Javascript, so I reached out into the Twitter community. Sam Starling, student and web coder, replied to my message and created a demo with a walkthrough. This enabled me to code my project with ease, whilst learning how it all worked. I am forever indebted to him for this.

My portfolio, as it stands, contains some of my best work from over the past year and a half. It will continue to be updated with more work as it appears. No doubt that Project New York will play a crucial part in it. That’s the story of my online portfolio. Should you want to check it out, head on over to www.chrisleydon.tv.

Chris Leydon.

Most people who listen to The Podzone know that the show is sponsored by GoDaddy.com, through a Mevio Producer Campaign, this explains why I’m dedicating an entire post to them. Another reason why GoDaddy.co.uk deserves its own post is because I truly believe in the product; I personally believe that GoDaddy are by far the best internet solutions company worldwide. I believe this to such an extent that this website and the Keyone Productions network is powered off of GoDaddy’s servers.

I would never endorse a product if I didn’t believe in it myself. I may have sold out to “the man” a long time ago, but I still have some morals. Personally I use GoDaddy for domain registration and website hosting, however they have a full suite of internet solutions available; anything from Podcast hosting to dedicated email servers.

GoDaddy is making a move on the UK market after taking the US by storm. The differences between GoDaddy.co.uk over GoDaddy.com is that prices are now listed in pounds sterling and there is also a dedicated UK helpline number. GoDaddy is truly positioning itself in the UK and is dedicating an entire team to help fit in over here.

As a result of GoDaddy’s launch in the UK, as GoDaddy.co.uk, some exclusive promo codes have been created to give customers a discount at the checkout. These promo codes are exclusive to BTPodShow partnered podcasts, and only 4 shows have been given the special codes; The Podzone is one of these shows. So as either a reader of this blog, or a listener to The Podzone, or even some Googler looking for a fantastic deal on GoDaddy products, here are your exclusive GoDaddy.com & GoDaddy.co.uk discount codes.

• PODZONE – 10% off of ANY order at GoDaddy.co.uk or GoDaddy.com
• PODZONE2 – 20% off of ANY ORDER OVER £24.99 at GoDaddy.co.uk or GoDaddy.com
• PODZONE4 – A .co.uk domain name for £2.70 for the first year at GoDaddy.co.uk or GoDaddy.com
• PODZONE25 – 25% off of ANY ORDER over £49.99 at GoDaddy.co.uk or GoDaddy.com
• PODZONE30 – 30% off of a .com domain name at GoDaddy.co.uk or GoDaddy.com
• PODZONE35 – A .com domain name for £3.50 at GoDaddy.co.uk or GoDaddy.com
• PODZONE50 – 50% off of a .co.uk domain name, for the first year, at GoDaddy.co.uk or GoDaddy.com

I trust and use GoDaddy.co.uk myself. My personal internet solutions are handled by them and so are my business internet solutions. I wouldn’t risk either of them, or promote this company, if I didn’t believe in GoDaddy and think that it’s a worthwhile company.

Take a gander around GoDaddy.co.uk, have a look at their services, their prices and try to find a better deal out there; I personally can’t. GoDaddy.co.uk, the world is your domain.

Chris Leydon.

Well I’m pleased to say that I did indeed sign that new BTPodShow contract, which means that The Podzone is guarenteed for at least another two years. I’ve also been working a bit more on script concepts and I’ve finished University for the year.

Finished, completely finished until September, you have no idea how good it feels to say that. Ahead of me I’ve got one long summer of work, making money and enjoying myself.

In the meantime however, I’ve discovered that my web design skills are so fantastic that the new Keyone Productions site, only works on about 90% of the worlds browsers. Yep, it doesn’t work with IE… oops. My day today will be spent correcting that mistake. I’ve started to learn CSS and I’m hoping to implement what I’ve learnt into the redesign.

Tomorrow, as a favour to my father, myself and Nick shall be headed to Bishops College (Gloucester) to film their Year 11 graduation. It should be fun as we’ll have a multicam set up and various other bits of over kill. We know that a job such as this doesn’t require all of the trims that we’re putting in to it; but I’ve got to do something to keep me amused until September.

Chris Leydon.

Fairly busy week.My Internet & HTML Technology assignment deadline and exam were this week. the exam was incredibly easy, I scored 97% which let’s face it isn’t bad going really; the assignment as perhaps the trickier task of the two.

The assignment was to create a website based around the streaming technologies that the BBC use on their websites. I had to create the website from scratch using a WYSIWYG, if you know me, or have seen my work, you know that I’m fairly capable at this kind of thing. The hardest thing about this assignment was simply the content; the BBC don’t REALLY use that many different streaming technologies, at least not that many up to date ones. They still use Real Video and Windows Media for their news reports, as an example, instead of Flash.

In the end I used a theme that I created for v.4.0 of the Keyone Productions website and customised it to fit my needs. If you want to take a look at the finished site, head on over to www.chrisleydon.com/bbc – I’m quite happy with my work.

I have one more assignment and one more exam left before I finish Uni for the year, the exam is on the 28th of April and the assignment needs to be in by the 2nd of June. My final assignment is for Audio Processing; I have to create an original piece of music and then write a report on the process, pretty much the same thing as last time – apart from this time we’re using Reason instead of Cubase.

I’ve taken this weekend off from working; I know that this isn’t a good plan but I feel as though I deserve it. Next week I’ll be working on Reason and the technical report. If I have some spare time I might even pop around once again, write a post and give you an update.

Chris Leydon.