Why I left Spotify and moved to Rdio

As of Sunday the 17th of March, after having been with Spotify for two years I decided to move to a new and upcoming provider, Rdio.

The significance of this post is to detail the fact that I would not in any frame of mind have moved away from Spotify if they had resolved an ongoing issue smoothly, in fact, at all.

Having used their service as a loyal customer for over two years, I thought Spotify would have dedicated more support and time to an ongoing issue that many users have experienced. The issue being Spotify no longer working with Sonos which I noticed on the 1st of January 2013 at 00:00 (quite literally). Sonos simply does not recognise my Spotify credentials, despite originally signing up as an email account holder.

I had been three months without Spotify through my Sonos, which has been a rather painstakingly difficult period for me. I require quality sound, and I require it when I want it, not when my provider decides they will solve an issue. Continue reading →

Where this is going and YAPS discontinued

The last few months have proved to be a tough time for myself. During the past few months I have finalised a divorce and clean break order, started a new position at an up and coming cloud service and moved into a new home. In turn, I haven’t had the chance to concentrate on YAPS.

While I thoroughly enjoy writing plugins and particularly the YAPS framework my heart currently lies with Ruby on Rails development, being that my job relies on it, and that I find it astoundingly enjoyable to code in.

Having a vast amount of ideas for small web apps that could be useful to many, further progressing YAPS, with the time required to manage and support the plugin framework will prohibit this. Thus, I have had to make the decision to discontinue the development. Continue reading →

A week with ruby on rails

For the past week I have been playing with ruby and of course, rails. My experience has been an absolute pleasure, I can’t quite express the joy I have in having the opportunity to learn, use and abuse ruby on rails.

Having come to experience ruby after 11 years with PHP and PHP alone as a server side language, the only frustration I have is learning new syntax. No, that’s not a fault of ruby’s, infact I find ruby to be an absolutely beautiful language to write in. Its so… English!
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Life and YAPS

I haven’t posted in a little while, that’s because on the 05th I started a new role at a excellent startup, Skyscape Cloud, acting as their only web developer.

My main development skills lie with PHP, however my new role has given me an opportunity to broaden my development horizons with ruby, specifically rails.
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YAPS (Yet Another Pluggable System)

In September I spent some time looking over existing WordPress plugins, looking through the code (some of which are beautifully written), the functionality and the extensibility. I came to the conclusion that on a user interaction, socialisation fore-front there isn’t a great deal of plugins out there, at least, not any that I liked.

The most well-known plugin for social member functionality is BuddyPress, and while I’m happy to take my hat off to them for the work that they have done, it just isn’t my cup of tea for extensibility. Extending BuddyPress feels out of the norm of the intentions of WordPress, but that could just be me.
Continue reading →