My darts website really taking off

Steve Grubb and Dave Ahmet - two darts pro's who I now call mates

I thought I’d find time while watching the British Golf Open to write a quick update about my golf website; Darts, Beers & Cheers! .

Since creating the darts fansite back in January (2010) I have posted several hundred updates and articles, sharing news on the PDC (and some BDO) darts scene.  I now have around 15 interviews, with darts players, darts officials, and even the more glamorous side of the darts, the ‘walk on girl’.

Recent interviews include such famous players as Mervyn King, Simon Whitlock, and Sky Sports presenter Dave Clark.

Because of my website I have become friends with a number of professional darts players, and am invited along to the PDC Pro tour (non public darts tournaments, where only some 120+ dart pros and their guests are allowed).   I am often in contact with the press officer of the PDC (Dave Allen), and have been working with Bravo TV to help publicise their upcoming European Darts Championship show.

It’s keeping me very busy, with a lot of my spare time chatting with players, darts fans, and watching darts in person or on TV.  It’s great stuff being able to combine my love of Darts and my technical and writing abilities.

Here’s an article I wrote after attending a press event in London where I got to chat with Barry Hearn, Dave Gorman (the comedian and writer), and even GOT TO PLAY PHIL ‘the power’ TAYLOR! Oh yes!

Who knows where it will end up!?

My latest website open

My darts fansite

I’ve just ‘opened’ my latest website – which I started on only three days ago!

“Darts, Beers & Cheers”  (http://www.pdc-darts.co.uk/) is a fansite for the great sport of darts (yes it is a sport – and that is OFFICIAL!).  I have created it to be a resource to all the fans of the PDC (Professional Darts Corporation) – with news, views, and reviews of players and darts tournaments.

Only two days in I’ve created a look n feel that I’m happy with (totally custom WordPress theme), some content, and even a world exclusive interview with one Wayne Mardle (top PDC darter).  I’m hoping the site will become one of THE resources for fans of the game.

Home brew shop

I’ve created a small home brew shop (in association with Amazon) to help you find those essentials – especially useful if you’re new to brewing. Just click on the link in the menu above (or here to save you time) and you will see I’ve collected together as much useful equipment and ingredients (and starter kits) as I think you might need.

If you are brand new to brewing, and want to try your hand without spending much, I’d recommend getting the minimal equipment for now, and a ‘off the shelf’ extract kit.  Some of the more modern kits give some surprisingly good results – and they are EASY to make.  Before you know it you’ll have 40 pints of your very own beer to drink, often at about 50-60 pence a pint! (ignoring initial set-up costs obviously).

What you need at a minimum…

• Cleaner/steraliser! (you must steralise everything!)
• Fermenting bucket (start with one .. go to secondary once you’re used it it!)
• Kit (contains hopped malt extract, instructions and yeast)
• 1kg of brewing sugar (most kits need a top up, but is needed for when you barrel the beer to add fizz)
• Barrel (OR bottles – better for ‘fizzy’ beers)
• Syphon (to get the beer out of fermenter to the barrel)

Or if you want a starter kit of equipment – go for something like this, and add a beer kit.

Once you’ve tried your first kit with that sort of equipment, you can try some other kits, and add to your gear.. until you’re ready to try your own recipes (I use cans of high quality malt extract, with speciality grains, and hops, and boil the lot up.. look at my posts which shows you how).

My “Blog style” websites upgraded

For my sites which are more ‘blog style’, such as this one, I use the fantastic open source WordPress software.  If you think running your own site like this would be tough, think again.  While I do have the skills to hand code websites, I am a pragmatic programmer – so if there’s already a bit of software that does 90% of what I want, and works well, why re-invent the wheel?

To be honest WordPress really is the dogs danglies – and once installed, is really easy to admin, and a really smooth experience.  I run it on my own servers, but anyone can get a wordpress hosted blog for free (here).  If you are thinking of installing your own blogging software (it does more than that too – lots of free 3rd party plugins for galleries and the like), you’ll need a web host running MySQL and PHP.  It does run on windows servers, there’s just a limitation on how ‘nice’ the urls can look (you need linux/Unix to get proper url re-writing unfortunately).  Most webhosts provide mysql and php as part of the hosting package, it’s the simple and free web dev of choice.

Today v2.8 arrived, with some nice enhancements, so I thought I better upgrade.  Even that was very simple and pain free (amazing in itself).  The software admin panel told me that there was an upgrade available, and asked me to click to upgrade.  Page asked if I wanted to download or automatically upgrade – I chose automatic (after backing up my database and files as suggested).  Within… 10 seconds…. site upgraded, job done.  That was it – it went and ftp’d the zip file off the WordPress server, unzipped it, copied and patched the files, and ran a database upgrade script – with one click.  Even me, a dedicated techie, enjoy that sort of upgrade path

So that’s this site, my wife’s LotrO Blog site (http://www.lordoftheringsonline.net/blog/), and her new crafts and writing blog site (http://www.craftywriter.co.uk) upgraded in 10 minutes between them.  If only all upgrades were so simple!

New entries on Bellin’s Blog

Bellin, hobbit alter ego

Mrs Krispy has posted quite a few new entries on her Lord Of the Rings Online inspired ‘diary’ (blog) – which can be found at http://www.lordoftheringsonline.net/blog/

It’s on offshoot of my main LotrO fansite – but using WordPress to power a separate blog (the main site uses PHP-Fusion), which my wife writes lots of original funny content for.  It’s the diary of one hobbit of the shire, and her adventures within the LotrO gameworld (as if it’s real rather than a game), and has been featured on the Codemasters website several times.  Codemasters Online have been a great friend to me in recent years, helping with my fansites, and giving me some interesting and juicy days out.  Free beer and playing games, doesn’t get much better does it?

New website created

I’ve been busy creating another website to add to my small empire, and while there’s more features to add, I favour an itterative approach – i.e. get something up there, with working features, and add in as you go.  With your own websites, I always advocate that appraoch, as if you try to write EVERYTHING before you put it up, you’ll often fail and never get there. Also don’t over engineer – don’t start writing huge amounts of backend code ‘in case’ you ever need it – write what you need when you need it.That might sound short sighted, but in reality, you hardly ever end up re-using as much code as you thought, and unless you are 100% sure of what you might need later, you will get it wrong anyway!

My new insult generator website

Not only can you generate insult after insult, but you can also contribute – thanks to a simple web form.  I have knocked up a basic admin page (password protected obviously!) where I can ‘ok’ contributions, and I intend to add to the functionality, allow ‘e-mail an insult’ to your friends.  To generate the insults, I make use of some of the MySQL magic to randomly generate numbers, to order, and to limit rows.

It’s all a bit of fun, only a few nights work, but it makes me laugh

Short-fiction updated again

I’ve made a tough decision and removed the ‘voting’ part of my story website (http://www.short-fiction.co.uk), after giving it a long consideration.

Luckily it wasn’t that hard to unhook the code – as there is only one php page to display all the stories – I just pass a ‘story id’ to the page, and it looks up it’s own content.

The trouble with having ‘votes’ for stories is that it is open to abuse, and an early ‘bad vote’ could put off both people from reading a story, and also the writer from ever contributing again.  So voting out, and hopefully more feedback to the writers in.

I’m working on a ‘random story of the day/week/month’ – to help push people towards stories they might not have looked at – currently I’ve just put a random story up on the main page, which is selected every time you display the page.

Using MySQL to get a random row from the database is actually very easy – and there are many ways to do it.  Instead of generating random ids/row numbers in my PHP code, I decided to let MySQL do all the work, and just give me a random row.  For those of you who want to get random data out of the database, here’s how I do it – but remember it’s not the only way!

$sql_random_story = “SELECT * FROM sf_stories sfs  where sfs.status=’S’ and category<>18 ORDER BY RAND(NOW()) LIMIT 1″;
$random_story_result = @mysql_query($sql_random_story,$connection) or die(mysql_error());
$sql_data_story = mysql_fetch_object($random_story_result);

Obviously the table name and where clause is specific to my set-up – but it gives you an idea.  The sql will pull back a random ordered dataset, but limited to 1 row (that’s the important bit) – so you only get 1 row back.  Unlike Oracle DB, the ordering is applied before the row limit – in oracle if you limit to x rows, that happens before the sort is applied, which is often useless!

Short-fiction updated

I’ve made some behind the scenes changes to my short-fiction.co.uk website (the current jewel in the crown, with 1,500 visitors a day!).

I’ve always had some amazon links/adverts on the site, as being a free story site, it made sense to link to their books.  It’s never made much money, just some vouchers every other month or so.  I realised that I probably wasn’t doing as well as I could, due to the fact I only had links and a bookshop using the UK version of Amazon, and as more than 2/3rds of my visitors from America, I was probably losing out on their potential sales.

So I read around the net, and decided to ‘geo-code’ the visitors IP address, working out where in the world they are from using their IP.  It’s not 100% foolproof, but is probably better than looking at their browser country/language settings (as UK people may well be set to US).  I managed to download a free database of IP ranges to country codes (106,000 rows in CSV file), which I loaded into MySql.  I read up and actually did that encoding the IP ranges as spacial co-ordiates, building virtual ‘rectangles’ out of them.  Then using some custom/fancy SQL, I take the vistor IP, make it a ‘point’ in this virtual IP space, and find which range of IPs the point falls in.  The reason for doing that instead of a simple ‘between’ comparing strings?  Performance!  Using the spacial method is far faster, especially under load.

Once done and tested, I just user some simple PHP if statements, showing either USA Amazon widgets/adverts or UK, depending if their IP falls in Great Britain or not.

Hello world!

Coming soon, the all new home and launchpad for the web world of Kristian ‘Krispy’ Brown.

Known to everyone by my nickname ‘Krispy’, I have been creating websites for .. well about 15 years now!  Starting out with notepad and a dodgy copy of photoshop v3, I created one of the most popular Terry Pratchett websites in the world.  Unfortunately it was lost to time…

I will post about my many websites, about my hobbies of gaming, beer, darts, and football (come on the POSH!), plus any other random thoughts on the world.