ThingyMaJig

Thingy Ma Jig is the blog of Nicholas Thompson and contains any useful tips, sites and general blog-stuff which are considered interesting or handy!

Connect

LinkedIn GitHub

Topics

announcement 25 apache 3 Apple 1 bash 8 code 7 cool 30 Days Out 8 Dark Basic Pro 4 design 12 doctor who 1 Drupal 74 E4600 1 EOS 400D 3 firefox 2 Flickr 3 free 21 games 5 geek 38 git 2 GreaseMonkey 1 hardware 7 Homebrew 1 How to 37 humour 5 iphone 1 javascript 1 jquery 1 K800i 6 k850i 4 lighttpd 3 linux 33 mac 9 miscellaneous 4 mobile phone 9 music 4 mysql 8 n73 1 n95 1 New Relic 1 Ogre3D 1 OS X 2 performance 3 photos 10 programming 40 Quicksilver 1 review 19 security 3 SEO 6 software 12 svn 2 technology 4 tip 7 tips 10 tv 3 video 3 vim 7 webdev 2 websites 33 wii 1 windows 1 YADS 10

announcement

These are articles relating to announcements I feel are worth announcing such as new games or websites

New Drupal Site: Rate My Christmas Tree

09 December 2010
Drupal websites YADS cool announcement

Ever wondered if your Christmas Tree is really any good? Well last weekend I decided to make a website for this purpose. It's just a bit of fun really! You login using your Facebook credentials (using Facebook Connect) and can create Chrismas Tree posts by linking to Flickr or Facebook photo's. You can then vote on your favourite tree's in an "A vs B" type match. If you like the sound of this and fancy something a bit festive, please give it a go and let me know if you have any thoughts! Head over to Rate My Christmas Tree :-)

New Dr who is Matt Smith

03 January 2009
tv geek doctor who announcement

The new Dr Who appears to be Matt Smith!

Whoa! He is so young! Almost depressingly, he is only 11 days younger than ME. Yes… The new Dr Who is younger than me.

I think he could be good. When the replaced Christopher Ecclestone with David Tennant I was a little wary and wondered if he could pull it off - which he obviously did. This guy looks (from the clips) like he should fit the character perfectly!

Relevant Content gets some love

25 September 2008
SEO programming Drupal announcement

I while ago (almost a year!) I released a module called Relevant Content to the community. This module executes a relatively lightweight SQL query which pulls up other nodes and sorts them by how many terms they have in common with the current node you're looking at. This provides a rudimentary method of suggesting other content to visitors to the page. It also provides a way of teaching search engines about other potentially relevant content.

Abessive For Drupal 6

16 September 2008
websites Drupal design announcement

My first theme, Abessive, gets a new release today for Drupal 6. Turns out to be a pretty easy upgrade!

In case nobody caught onto what Abessive was the first time; it is an (almost) image free theme with flexible 1, 2 or 3 column layout (depending on where/if you place any blocks). Each block/section has rounded corners and slight top & bottom gradient which is achieved using only CSS techniques involving margins, padding and background colours. This makes the theme very lightweight and elegant at the same time.

Abessive Screenshot

Node Quick Find

06 April 2008
programming Drupal announcement

I've just committed another module - Node Quick Find. That brings my projects to a nice round 10!

This module is a pretty basic one though. It simply provides a block which has an autocomplete field. This field is linked to the Node Title field. You start typing the Node Title and it will start suggesting possible nodes you might be interested in - sort of like a primitive search box.

It features primitive configuration, allowing an administrator to easil configure the title of the prompt, the size and the types of nodes returned in the autocomplete list (eg, you may want to limit the list to blogs only).

A2B2 launch shared hosting service

07 January 2008
technology miscellaneous announcement

A2B2XS Shared Hosting

I currently host this Drupal blog using a VPS with a company called A2B2 (they have a new website coming soon) and in the past 12 months have been nothing but impressed by them… so impressed, in fact, that I've given out many personal recommendations and I've even recommended a friend who has transferred all his main sites over!

To add to their arsenal, A2B2 launched a sister company a few months back called CheapVPS.co.uk which aims at a slightly lower-end market to that targeted by A2B2. Basically A2B2 use slightly higher-end hardware whereas CheapVPS offer lower prices - but on marginally less-capable hardware.

On top of A2B2's VPS server & CheapVPS offering a more budget VPS, A2B2 have now launched A2B2XS - a Shared Hosting service. They currently offer 1Gb space + 25Gb Bandwidth for under £20 per year - that's less than £1.70 a month!

Cubalaya integrates with Drupal

28 July 2007
Drupal announcement

Not many people have heard of Cubalaya. I know I hadn't a few months back when they contacted me about potential advertising on my site. Now Cubalaya isn't a shop - its not like Amazon or even eBay. Its more like Kelkoo or Pricerunner - its a Price Comparison Site really. Well now you can easily integrate this PPC (Pay Per Click) advertiser onto your site and provide your own category sensitive products.

New Drupal Site - Codebase

06 June 2007
YADS programming Drupal Dark Basic Pro announcement

Today I officially launch a new Codebase for Dark Basic Pro. I'm a big fan of Dark Basic Pro and this Codebase is one of the ways I'd like to help the community back. There is a codebase which The Games Creators provide and it is a good codebase with a LOT of content. This codebase, however, offers more  "Web 2.0" features such as free tagging, comments and rating (and I've only just got started - more to come!).

Codebase Large Banner

Social Statistics module released

11 May 2007
software free Drupal announcement

I've been working on it for a few days now, but its finally released. Social Statistics is being used on this site and can be found on any page on an enabled site in a block. It provides pluggable statistics for (currently) 3 major Social Networking websites; Del.icio.us, Digg and Ma.gnolia. It currently boasts caching of statistics for a configurable amount of time, AHAH retrieval of statistics which are not cached (thus not slowing down page loads) and an API to make the project extendible to anybody who cares to add a Social Network to the mixture!

The core module consists, mostly, of a few menu callbacks and an API. This API allows the user to enable any number of enabled modules to add their contribution to the block. The 3 enabled sites all have an XML based API, but each does things slightly differently - hence my choice in using them as examples of the module as a whole.

You can find this module over in the Drupal Projects section.

Drupal gets a $100,000 injection thanks to Google!

12 April 2007
programming Drupal announcement

Google announced today that it will be sponsoring 20 - yes twenty - projects for its Google Summer of Code program this year. From what I've seen, Drupal is one of the top "winners" if you use project quantity as a metric, with only Apache and KDE beating us (I couldn't see any others with any more at a glance). We got more than Joomla, PHP & The Mozilla Foundation and I believe this is a real achievement.

I'm also thrilled that Konstantin Käfer and I am mentoring one of the projects this year - the Taxonomy Manager.

Thingy Ma Jig finally moved to Drupal 5

30 March 2007
YADS websites Drupal announcement

It's taken me long enough to get around to, but finally Thingy Ma Jig has been upgraded to the latest and greatest in all things Drupal.

All in all, I'd say it was a fairly (and surprisingly) painless experience. There were a few minor glitches along the way though…

Pongis - a new game I made!

20 February 2007
software programming games free Dark Basic Pro cool announcement

I've just released a new game - its a VERY simple adaptation of the classic, pong, but it has a twist in the form of tennis. You must rally the ball back and forth - the ball gaining speed slightly on every return. Players win points (and serve) by knocking the ball past their opponent, either through a cunning move or by making them lose out in a game of reactions.

Checkout the game here - Pongis - Where Pong Meets Tennis

I have my own page!

11 February 2007
YADS websites Drupal announcement

I bought the domain a while ago but haven't had time to set anything up - well this is a start. Its not much to shout about yet (and probably never will be) but I'm pleased with the design and think that its good to have a kind of "CV" site.

Site updates

14 November 2006
announcement websites

The site has recently had a few updates…

  • Tagadelic - A Tag Cloud which shows all the tags used on this site but sized and weighted to show how often they are used. More cool than practicle :-)
  • Design - The headers have had a slight design change - I quite like the gradient/line/drop-shaddo look they have now
  • Photo's and projects added... You can see more and more content coming onto the site!

Drupal 5.0 beta 1 released!

31 October 2006
Drupal announcement programming

Drupal 5.0 beta1 has been announced.

It comes with many new features, including a web-based install system, improved administration tools, and a shiny new theme! There are also tons of under-the-hood improvements, such as the inclusion of the jQuery JavaScript library, node access system improvements (ACL), and many improvements to the Form API.

read more at drupal.org

Welcome to Thingy Ma Jig

30 August 2006
announcement websites

Welcome to TMJ. This site contains the work and thoughts of its owner, Nicholas Thompson. This is version 3 of Thingy Ma Jig. It started out being a table-based hand written site with very basic features. I then started to write version 2 with more features which I learned since starting version 1. Since then I have been introduced to Drupal which is, in my opinion, the best content management system available (or at least for free).

This is a drupal powered site which currently contains a few Dark Basic Pro programs and games I've written (I hope to upload MANY more), a blog which I have just started and some RSS feeds from some sites (down the right).