Kitsite news and comment

Tour of Olympic Park

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:13:00 GMT

Today we went on a suppliers' tour of the Olympic Park. I last did this a couple of years ago, when the site mainly consisted of huge piles of earth waiting to be decontaminated. The progress since then has been astonishing, with the Olympic Stadium looking all but complete and Zaha Hadid's Aquatics Centre half way there. Massive progress also on the media centre and the village.The numbers are almost too big to take in: 80,000 tonnes of soil here, 4,000 workers there. There's a lot of quirky detail too though, whether it's the hawker who comes in every fortnight to discourage pigeons, or the "Fish out" programme that involved gently electrifying the river before expansion work began.I know there are still naysayers out there, the likes of Iain Sinclair. But what comes over more than anything else is the team's real commitment to the environment, the local area and, yes, the "legacy". Random example: they've set a target of having 7% of the workforce being people who were previously unemployed; and they've exceeded that at 10%. Or: 68% of contracts have been awarded to SMEs; not least, us! We're proud to be involved in this project, and it looks like it's going to be a great games.

Picfog at Minibar

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:59:00 GMT

Janós, our latest recruit, will be demoing his baby Picfog at Minibar this Friday.Picfog gives you a real-time image stream, with search and trends, based on images uploaded to Twitter. It's really pretty cool.Minibar is our favourite tech/entrepreneurial networking event in London. It's (usually) the last Friday in the month, held at a bar in Spitalfields, and although there are more presentations from the likes of Paypal and fewer pitches from innovative startups than there used to be, it's still pretty cool too.Hope to see you there: we'll be the ones tweeting photos from our iPhones.

London 2012 website wins multiple awards

Fri, 7 Aug 2009 14:36:00 GMT

Congratulations to the team at London 2012. The official website for the London 2012 Olympica and Paralympic games picked up two awards from the SportBusiness Ultimate Sports website awards this week. Content management for the website is provided by Kitsite.

Many years ago...

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:23:00 GMT

Some footage of a warehouse party in what is now our studio, 21 years ago. Compare the dodgy looking alley that was Clink St then with the tourist trap it's become today...

E4X gotchas

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:40:00 GMT

We've been playing with E4X for handling XML in Javascript. It's pretty good stuff, but there are some gotchas.To create an XMLList (i.e. a list of an arbitrary number of XML elements), you should use the following (rather ugly) construct:var x = <>text1 Some plain text text2<>Omitting the <>... tags will lead to a (rather unhelpful) syntax error being reported.E4X reserved wordsvar x = myXml.@attr-name;var x = myXml.@id;var x = myXml.my-element;are perfectly valid as far as E4X is concerned. However, they're NOT when you embed them in javascript. You need to use the following syntax for javascript reserved words (e.g. "id", "class", "delete", etc.) and attributes/names containing "-":var x = myXml.@["attr-name"];var x = myXml.@["id"];var x = myXml["my-element"];insertChildAfter()var x =;x.insertChildAfter(x.el,);You might expect the above to insert aelement after theelement. However - in fact - it silently does nothing. This is because "x.el" isn't an xml element, it is - in fact - an xml list. The correct syntax for the above is as follows:var x =;x.insertChildAfter(x.el[0],);

Goodbye, Aanand

Fri, 15 May 2009 14:55:00 GMT

Sadly, Aanand's leaving us today, moving to Montreal in a mistaken bid to be Scott Pilgrim. He joined Kitsite back at the tail end of 2006. Since then we've probably learned as much from him as he has from us. He's made major contributions to several of our projects, including London 2012 and most recently Jit, as well as helping to drive our current transition from Java to Rails. We're going to miss him. Bon voyage, Aanand!

The Guardian Open Platform

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:40:00 GMT

Jamie and I went along this morning to the launch of the Guardian Open Platform. The Guardian is releasing a couple of APIs and some surrounding infrastructure that will let 3rd party developers build apps using Guardian content and data.I haven't had a chance to try any of this in anger yet, but it looks like a well-thought out effort. The API is built on top of the Guardian's Endeca search engine, so you get full text search as well as filtering by editorially assigned tags. There's a lovely API explorer, and the whole thing "speaks web" convincingly. Interesting to see they're using Mashery for API management.It's also brave—pretty much all their text content is there. Understandably, they're moving cautiously through the beta phase. You have to get approved for an API key, the terms of use are subject to change, and by default you get your API calls capped at 5k per day, cacheable for up to 24 hours. That last restriction will rule out any personalised news targeting a large user base.There are no photos or other media covered by the APIs—I expect rights issues relating to these will pose problems with making them available in future either. So you won't be releasing a rival site to the Guardian any time soon ;) But there is a fantastic looking data API, which gives you access to authoritative, curated data sets. This really works for me; the crowdsourced web too often overlooks the value of editorial winnowing and fact checking.Maybe the most interesting bit (not yet on stream), is talk of opening up a commissioning channel for embedding widgets and apps in the Guardian network itself, with some kind of ad revenue split.More at www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform

See you in Dublin?

Mon, 2 Mar 2009 15:40:00 GMT

As Kieran is based in Dublin, FOWA Dublin seemed like too good an opportunity to miss. I'm heading over with Jamie on Friday. Should make quite a change from its older and bigger brother in London.If you want to meet up, drop me a line.

Jit beta launched

Thu, 5 Mar 2009 15:40:00 GMT

Our new webapp is going into private beta and we're looking for testers. It's a new "just in time" take on website editing (hence the name). Check out the video or signup for an invite code if you'd like to give it a try.

Happy new year

Fri, 2 Jan 2009 15:40:00 GMT

We had a pretty eventful 2008 (not that you'd know it by looking at our blog—must do better this year!), and 2009's not looking too shabby either. We've got a completely new webapp about to enter alpha, and a major upgrade for an older app due to roll out in January. More on those later.Our new year's resolution? The same as every other web developer's: we're going to stop supporting IE6.