My workmate and friend Neil Crosby has been running a very original and nice site on the web for quite a while now as a totally home brew project. I figured it would be nice to make a post about it as it surely deserves some more recognition on the web. Enter The Ten Word Review.

I guess the name says it all!

The Ten Word Review is a site that contains reviews. Reviews of just about anything. In exactly ten words. No more, no less. You'd think it's not possible but surprisingly this rule leads to lots of really interesting and creative results. Just to give you an example let me quote the review of my favourite movie of all time: The Big Lebowski:

Greatest movie EVER. But that's just, like, your opinion, man.

I guess you get the picture. Ten words can really say it all when written with care!

The Ten Word Review is not just a website run by Neil. It's in fact a community of it's own. Visitors can create an account on which they publish their reviews. After registering you'll get your very own profile page on which your reviews will appear. As an added value it's also possible for other users to write a ten word review about other users. These will also appear on profile pages. As an example look at Neil's own profile or my profile.

In addition to all this, the site contains it's own blog and even its own API. The brand new flash banner that you see in this post uses it to show reviews on other websites.

So if you like reading/rating or writing clever reviews, go and check out The Ten Word Review!

I'm writing this entry live from the Hackday London organised by Yahoo! and BBC Backstage. At the moment there are some quite interesting sessions going on and the actual hacking will kick off after lunch. I'll try to update this post as this excellent event evolves!

For now, check out the Hackday London Backnetwork site. My profile on it is right here.

View my Hack Day Flickr stream

Update: As you've noticed I haven't really gotten to post more updates. The verdict on the first EU Open Hackday: absolutely brilliant. A most awesome event with great people and a superb atmosphere. I enjoyed every minute of it. A whopping 73 different hacks in a wide variety was the result of this great weekend.

I ended up helping out a team with a pure Javascript hack using Greasemonkey, Yahoo! Pipes, YUI and various other Yahoo! APIs. Greasemonkey was one of those things I never got to really look into before which is why it was great to hack around with it for a night. And as a cherry on the pie the guys even ended up winning a prize with it which made it totally worthwhile.

I'm already looking forward to the next Hack Day!

If you weren't here on this edition make sure you don't miss the next one!

Warning: opinionated rant ahead.

I guess a lot has been said about the new London 2012 logo. I do have to give it to whoever authorised this logo as the new official one for the Olympic Games in 2012: it has brought a sense of unity to all Londoners. All of them think this logo totally and utterly sucks. United as one indeed. And rightfully so in my humble opinion.

The design bureau behind this travesty, Wolff Olins <sarcasm>beautiful website, by the way!</sarcasm> supposedly received a whopping £ 400.000 (yes, almost $800.000) for the London 2012 Olympics branding. I guess once you've made sufficient name in the market you can get away with anything these days.

For this staggering amount of money for which you can buy a pretty damn nice apartment in London they managed to come up with a logo that:

• has absolutely NOTHING to do with sports
• has absolutely NO Olympic feel except for the Olympic rings in it which seem to have been added last-minute
• has absolutely NO 'London' feel
• has absolutely NO British feel
• hurts to even look at because of the appaling choice of colours
• looks like a random set of shapes thrown together (it's a good thing they explain it's the number 2012 somewhere in it or I'd never have guessed)

Just to show some contrast, take a look at the Beijing 2008 logo. It has a sports feel, it has a Chinese feel. It basically has what everyone would expect from an Olympics logo. Nice, classy and in style. All very much unlike the London 2012 logo.

According to the terms and conditions I'm not allowed to actually show the 'masterpiece' that is the London 2012 logo on my site which is why you'll have to look at it on the official website. I'm not sure I'd even WANT to show it in this post to be honest.

Now I'm not a 'branding expert' myself. I'm not even the greatest logo designer. When it comes to this however I feel pretty safe when saying "I can do better than that". Heck, my fiancee's 3 year old daughter Adisyn can most likely do better than this. When it smells like shit, it probably is shit. And that my friends I think this new 'brand' is.

This entry is the second part in a series of articles about website performance tuning. If you haven't yet, read the first article before you proceed with this one.

So I went and optimized this very website for a bit as well. I changed my css.php which I mentioned earlier in 'Compress your CSS' to perform gzip compression, resulting in only 3kb of CSS. On this site I didn't need the functionality my WP-CSS-Streamliner plugin offers because I only have one CSS file on here anyway. Here's the code for the new css.php which serves compressed CSS on a per-file basis:

1. <?php
2. ob_start("ob_gzhandler");
3. header('Content-type: text/css');
4. if (!preg_match("/^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+.css$)/", $_GET['file'])) {
5. die('not a css file.');
6. }
7. if(file_exists($_GET['file'])) {
8. $sText = file_get_contents($_GET['file']) or die('Could not open file.');
9. $sText = preg_replace('!/*[^*]**+([^/][^*]**+)*/!', '', $sText);
10. $sHash = md5($sText);
11. header("Last-Modified: ".date("D, d M Y H:i:s T", filemtime($_GET['file'])));
12. header("ETag: "{$sHash}"");
13. echo str_replace(array("rn", "r", "n", "t", ' ', ' ', ' ', ' '), '', $sText);
14. }
15. else {
16. echo 'The file named "'.$_GET['file'].'" was not found on the server!';
17. }
18. ob_flush();
19. ?>

Note: css.php must be placed in the same directory where your CSS file lives and called like css.php?file=whatever.css.

Now let's have a look at the Javascript situation.