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@psyked_james
James Ford

Link: Humans TXT

Humans.txt is an interesting idea – it’s (another) way for websites to create an association between the people (developers, authors, marketers, and so on) that are behind the creation of the website and the website itself, without actually including that information in the content of said website.  It’s not exactly a web development standard, but it’s a neat idea; and it’s the kind of information that’s “there if you’re looking for it” but remains otherwise hidden from view – as it should be.

The format itself is very simple – it’s a plain-text file, called ‘humans.txt’, and it’s placed at the root of the website.  In to that file you place whatever content you want, and whatever content is appropriate.  A little more elegant than placing that content in the comments of your HTML, as has been done in the past.

For us Geeks, there’s a neat little plugin available for Google Chrome, which simplifies the discovery and viewing of these humans.txt files, when they exist on any website you visit.
The humans.txt plugin for Chrome is available from this link.

The slides from my presentation at FlashMidlands.

My FlashMidlands presentation has now taken place, and here’s my slides, to share with the world:

Win a copy of the Flash Facebook Cookbook, at my FlashMidlands session, this Saturday.

On Saturday 19th November I’ll be doing a session on the Flash Facebook Cookbook at the FlashMidlands meetup, and will have a copy or two of the book to give away.

In the session I will be looking at working with the Facebook Graph API and Flash. Starting where the Flash Facebook Cookbook starts we’ll cover relevant background theory on how the APIs work – how to authenticate applications and obtain access tokens, how to request data from, and send data to Facebook, and how to obtain Extended Permissions from the user.

I’ll be using Flash Builder and the Flex framework to show examples of how everything works in practice, and then we’ll have a look at the possibilities and limitations of what you can do with Flash and Facebook.

If that sounds fun, and you’re in the UK, and you can get to Warwick on Saturday, join me!

I’m terrified enough by the idea of giving a presentation, so more people can’t hurt!

Corona SDK: Solving JSON decode error with UTF-8 files.

While working with JSON-encoded data files, I had some problems getting the darn things to work.  Apart from an unhelpful error message, the Corona simulator gave me no clues as to what was wrong. Turned out that the problem was actually to do with the UTF-8 encoding. And in the end, what fixed it was changing the UTF-8 encoding to “UTF-8 without BOM” – the default UTF-8 encoding just didn’t cut it.