Some are quite funny and I would have loved to have found them when they were up!

• Trampstation
• Flamestation
• Moustachestation
• Grannystation
• Pigstation
• Tutustation
• Bikinistation
• Artificialinseminationstation
• Tentingstation
• Chavstation
• Legstation
• Bongstation
• Moiststation
• Stripstation
• Massdebatestation

The competition page

Confirmed websites such as grannystation.co.uk and chavstation.co.uk were found and posted on the gamestation’s competition page.

Screenshot as of 7th November 2011 of the competition page on the gamestation website

As soon as I figured out that all the fake websites adhered to a simple naming pattern, (plus with me being a bit geeky and excited about writing something new) I wrote a powershell script that attempted to visit every site.  The script took in the English dictionary of words between 2 and 8 characters long and appended “station.co.uk”.  If it found a link to the gamestation.co.uk website, it would log it and move on to the next.

The script, it ran…

Lo-and-behold it found two more that had not been posted on the gamestation site.  I didn’t really care if I won the grand prize, I just did it for the fun and wanted to investigate all the work that the designers went to to create these sister sites.

I found www.tutustation.co.uk and www.bongstation.co.uk

I contacted customer services…

I entered the competition and checked back daily to see if my new findings were detailed on the site. Nope. Long after the competition ended, I emailed customer services and these are the responses I received:

Sorry but this competition does not run anymore . I no longer have access to any information regarding this.

Regards,

Syd W

I responded by saying “I know it doesn’t run anymore, that’s why I’m asking. How come you have no information regarding the competition? I would just like a list of the websites that were involved. Some information is available at [link to competition page] but it’s old and that information was available before the end of the competition.”

I would [...] like to apologise for any confusion. A list of the ‘fake’ websites and winners can be found by following the link below:

http://www.gamestation.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/HubArticleView?hubId=148280&articleId=148287&catalogId=10202&langId=45&storeId=10651

I apologise for any confusion this may have caused, and please do not hesitate to contact us with any further queries you may have.

Regards,

Sam F

Haha, this is the same link that I had just emailed to them! I ask again: “I’m afraid that is not the case. I found http://tutustation.co.uk/ but that is not listed. Why can’t you provide the full information?”

The competition regrettably is now over. If you have submitted your answer to the competition providers they will contact us direct if you are winner.

If you have any further queries please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Regards,

Charlotte H

Their excuse of the competition being over implies that I should have asked while the competition was running! What a joke.  At least now though I have learned from this email that the competition providers are a separate company to gamestation, yet at the bottom of the competition page it clearly states: “The promoter of the competition is Gameplay (GB) Ltd. trading as Gamestation”.

For now I don’t think I will ever find out what the other fake gamestation sites were. Maybe I did find them all? My curiosity is not yet satisfied.

Well how about we think a little differently… We know that there are 24 hours in a day. How about we use a DateTime type to natively count using base 24? We could initialise our datetime object at DateTime.MinValue and then use .AddHours(input) to start counting in base 24. To increment or decrease the value we can use the .AddHours() function again to count in native base 24. We have now got a native representation of base 24!

Check out this table of all the fancy bases you can get out of the DateTime type:

*Number of timezones differ per operating system. Windows has 75 I think.

Also, if you’re clever, you would have noticed by now that all of the above is basically useless as you will always have to use a string dictionary to get it into a form ready for saving to a db, sending to another app or displaying to the user. This has no use other than for the sheer fun of using weird methods to calculate numbers

Don’t know how I’m going to use these but I have them for two years so I have that time to think up a brilliant plan!

I was thinking of sending all 3ible.com traffic over to youversion.com as I greatly admire their responsive ajaxy site.  It’s a huge step up from the stone-age biblenet.com and has lots of great translations (My current favourite is GOD’S WORD translation)

That is all for now, gonna be writing some more posts soon when I have some time!

Oh and Microsoft support is awesome

A pie chart of increasing values 0-100% could be stored as 20 separate independent images, named pie-[00-100].gif.  This however is inefficient for both the browser, the server, and the user.  The user will have to wait for the image to download if they haven’t already seen it (and hence cached it).  In my example I have 20 pie charts of increasing values in one image.  The background-position css property will dynamically change via server-side code to show only one of the 20 available pie charts.

Here’s the finished article:

Here’s how it was done…

my models.py:

class Question(models.Model):
[........]
def offset(self, total, votes, full_length, slice_length):
    desired_length = (full_length - slice_length) * (votes/total)
    offset_pixels, remainder = divmod(desired_length,slice_length)
    offset_pixels *= slice_length
    if (remainder > slice_length / 2.0):
        offset_pixels += slice_length
    return str(offset_pixels) + 'px'

def yes_pie_offset(self, full_length, slice_length):
    if self.num_votes > 0:
        return self.offset(self.num_votes, self.num_yes, full_length, slice_length)
    else:
        return "0px"

def no_pie_offset(self, full_length, slice_length):
    if self.num_votes > 0:
        return self.offset(self.num_votes, self.num_no, full_length, slice_length)
    else:
        return "0px"

my views.py

yes_pie = question.yes_pie_offset(630,30)
no_pie = question.no_pie_offset(630,30)

template where it’s in use:

<div class="pie greenpie" style="background-position:-{{yes_pie}} 0"></div>

Basically, the view gives the model’s methods two arguments, the entire length of the sprite, and how long each image is.  The methods will use two of their own values to come up with how much to fill the pie chart.  It will return a positive integer that is a multiple of the individual image length.  Remember to use a negative sign before the template tag if your sprite goes from low to high (as my example below)

I got this image from here but had to add my own 0% pie chart to the very left

(sorry if you didn’t understand this, I’m very tired now and can’t explain myself very well)

I hope this new design fairs better!  I went for a clean tall and thin font and placed in some minimalist art above.  I could also experiment with some reflection (i don’t mean nasty web2.0 reflection, but some classy stuff) but for the moment I like this. Now i just got to find a way of implementing it into the site design i’ve come up with

http://www.speedyshare.com/635861674.html

There is a setting you can add to your settings.py to change the number of chirps that show on a single page (default 15): NUMBER_OF_CHIRPS_PER_PAGE

Lots of things have changed! Please look through the code, I’ve commented it so it should be easy to follow (please note as of yet there is no user recognition when @someone is typed in the content of a chirp- That’ll come later)

So if you still wanted this uncluttered view but still desired to allow the user to see the exact moment that was, then maybe you’d have to let the user check a checkbox in their user settings are show an exact time when the view of that object is more detailed.  However I’ve come up with the idea that on mouseover the nice and informal ‘time since’ can be replaced with an exact time of the post in an easy custom filter.

Here’s the same chirp as shown above but with the mouse hovering over the time.

When the mouse is rolled back out, the informal time since is displayed again.

Seamless user experience showing more detail when the user wants it

from django.utils import timesince, dateformat

@register.filter
def timetoggle(time, id):
link = "<span id=\""+str(id) + "timesince\"> about <a href=\"#\" onmouseover=\"document.getElementById('"+str(id)+"timeactual').style.display=''; document.getElementById('"+str(id)+"timesince').style.display='none';return false;\">"
link += timesince.timesince(time)
link += " ago</a> </span><span id=\""+str(id)+"timeactual\" style='display:none'> at <a href=\"#\" onmouseout=\"document.getElementById('"+str(id)+"timeactual').style.display='none'; document.getElementById('"+str(id)+"timesince').style.display='';return false;\">"
link += dateformat.DateFormat(time).format("g:ia o\\n l jS N Y")
link += "</a></span>"
return mark_safe(link)

Use in the following way: {{ time_object|timetoggle:unique_identifier }}   Here’s an example: {{ post.pub_date|timetoggle:post.id }}

/əˈθɛlər/
uh-the-luh