Welcome to Simon Philp's Blog

Anyone who follows me on twitter will no doubt be fed up hearing about my daily gym chat. Yes, I am addicted, I do have a problem :P. One of my main classes I attend is Body Combat.  A couple of months ago I wrote a blog post about this latest addiction, Discovering Les Mills - Body Combat. Within this post I mentioned the program directors Dan and Rachael Cohen along with an instructor who posts his own videos on youtube Tommy Damani. Tommy is the reason I write this. For anyone who hasn’t heard of Tommy here is...

As mentioned in my previous post we got a nice white Christmas this year with an impressive amount of snow.  While walking back from the shops i managed to take this picture on my phone: I hope the snow continues to be with us till the new year. I am hoping to get up north for some snowboarding as the webcams are showing good coverage on the majority of resorts.  I plan on hitting Aviemore, Nevis and Glencoe. Watch this space for pictures :) Have a nice Boxing Day, if you're travelling have a safe journey.   If you have any...

Well this morning was a bit of a shock when I looked out the window to find the below: This was the result of 3 hours of heavy snow. What a day, been out snowboarding, yes, in Dalgety Bay :) I’d like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a happy new year. Stay safe and to a fabulous 2010.

If you’re on twitter then you may have noticed the #uksnow appear in the trending topic. Watching the trend on twitter or a desktop client isn’t going to do anything for you. However, Ben March has developed the #uksnow Map 2.0 whereby a twitter user can update their status like the following #uksnow EH3 0/10. The status broken down.......

At the end of last month I started working on tweaking my subtext skin so that I can increase my YSlow score.  What did I do? Merged several css files into one sheet Merged JavaScript files into one file Put items 1/2 files onto a CDN Placed site wide images on a CDN Moved the JavaScript calls to the bottom of the page I also merged xfn icons into one image and used a CSS sprite Before...

It wasn’t until a friend Simone on twitter stated about how it’d been snowing all night that I suddenly realised, I’ve not checked the weather reports for up north. Yes, this year I am late in checking out my usual winter haunts. Usually I am on top of any sign of snow fall up in the highlands in hope that the season will kick off early. Like the previous posts: What a pretty sight... Early Season? - Oct 2008 Nevis gets some powder - Nov 2007 Man is it...

I know the new skin for my site is overdue but I am waiting for the next release of subtext so I can fine tune my skin to any changes made in the release. During this lapse I have been contributing to the project and I have also been adapting another nice theme that will be finished in the next couple of days. This post is related to a previous post, ongoing maintenance where I talk about my sites YSlow score (33) :(. Using the FireFox plugin httpfox I loaded up my website and was...

Quick post about the recent release of Clubland 16. This 3CD compilation has some fantastic tracks. If you need something to give you a little kick up the back side at the gym and don’t mind a bit of hard dance then this little number is perfect.  At current time of writing, you can buy this from Amazon for £11.98 which includes free delivery in the UK. The workout kicks off with an Ultrabeat cover of Use Somebody from the Kings of Leon followed by an Ultrabeat remix of Cheryl Cole’s – Fight For This Love.  I wouldn’t just listen to...

BODYCOMBAT™ is a non-combat, martial arts-based fitness program with moves drawn from Karate, Tae Kwan Do, Kung Fu, kickboxing, Muay Thai and Tai Chi. Each 55-minute BODYCOMBAT™ class is choreographed to 10 tracks of the latest music, providing an exhilarating exercise experience that delivers ultra-fast fitness results. * taken from official Les Mills body combat site For anyone that knows me or follows me on twitter will know that for the last 8 months I have been addicted to spin classes at my local gym. I do spin 4 – 5 times a week depending on who’s taking the class as...

In the past I have posted about holiday tunes: New additions to the snowboarding playlist Some holiday tunes for Majorca 2008 With me going on holiday to Tenerife soon I thought I would do another round up of what’s on my iPod along with other bits and bobs.  * Photo by Guido’s. Current holiday podcasts : Dj Cruze Dj Ted Eiel One Phat Dj Martin Lucas Trance Euphoria – Dj Discovery ...

First thing if you’re using subtext for your blogging engine then I would like to point you in the direction of Phil Haack’s blog where he has announced an important security issue. Secondly it’s been a while since I posted about the progress of my site re-vamp. Due to work and personal reasons this has taken longer than expected. I’m trying to outline my steps in posts, going from conception to implementation. I’ll be posting them once I have made the skin live in hope to help someone out there. If you have a subtext blog and taken the plunge...

Ok maybe the title is a little harsh? I hate spammers with a passion. If it’s not online drugs, it’s casinos or fake banking site phishing for details. I don’t usually write about the random junk I get but this email stuck out. Did you know Microsoft had a consumer award of which you can win a cool half mill? I don’t believe for one minute that anyone would take such a thing seriously? This reminds me of the 419 eater site which tempts me to setup a temp email address and fire something back to this...

If you follow me on twitter then you’ve probably heard about my clean out of old domains. Some are on sedo others may be a holding page. If the site is on sedo and you’re interested then please follow the online steps, most are open to offers. If it’s a holding page then please contact me stating domain name and offer :)

It’s been a long time coming but over the next couple of weeks you’ll be seeing quite a lot of changes going on. My website will be under going a big face lift.  With all this in mind, should you hit an error page then I can assure you that if you leave it 5 minutes and refresh all will be back to normal.  During this time I will be upgrading to the latest version of subtext of which I won’t be “tweaking” the admin area which i normally do. Not only am I hoping  to implement a new subtext skin...

jQuery Plugin – Fun with Query String Object I have been working on an internal application which uses ajax and modal popups so that the user/manager/administrator doesn’t need to navigate to different pages to do different actions.  While this looked the part and done everything it said on the tin I ran into a problem. When a user acknowledged an event that needs authorisation a email is sent to the appropriate manager asking for action.  This email needed to contain a link that when the manager clicked it, the appropriate section was shown. No point in re-inventing the...