Eat your greens!

Dancin' with Manson has been stuck in my head all day. Nice to find a video on youtube, complete with flying V guitar.

DSC00730.JPG, originally uploaded by eat your greens.

The November Amnesty book sale is behind us now and the total take was £3,250 last night. Slightly down on previous years, but our total for 2007 is over £12,000 - a phenomenal amount for two sales organised by a small number of very dedicated volunteers. Many thanks to everyone involved. We’ll be back in June 2008 to sell a fresh batch of books.

Really handy overview from Simon Willison - 130 slides about Ajax. Around about slide 58 he talks about the magical power of JSON. If you’re still using XML to pass objects and data around, have a look at this.

I’ve been using JSON at work to open up our collections databases. The Collections Online search results pages are seperated into a controller script, which parses the URL for search query parameters and pass them off to the backend data model; a set of backend classes which run SQL and generate result sets containing the results; and a HTML view page which takes a search results object, loops through and displays the list of records. Fairly straightforward Model-View-Controller design. This gives me the flexibility to write new views of the data without having to muck about writing new SQL and data-processing code.

So I’ve experimented with writing a new view page (less than 10 lines of coldfusion code) which encodes the search results object as a JSON string. I’ve then added a module to our content management system which can read the JSON object and display it as a photo gallery. Kind of cool really - an object is instantiated in Coldfusion MX on one server, but then processed and presented by PHP running on a second server. JSON is very handy for these situations where you need to pass complex data structures between systems running on different application servers.

The next step, I think, would be to come up with some reasonable, standardised representation of collections records then open up our data with a standard JSON API that can be used by anyone.

Slave Britain is an exhibition of photos, by Panos Pictures, illustrating the reality of the modern trade in human beings, 200 years after the slave trade was legally abolished in Britain. Blackheath & Greenwich Amnesty International will be displaying the photos in Lewisham Library from this Saturday (24th November) until 10th December.

The end of November will also see the opening of the new Atlantic Worlds gallery at the Maritime Museum. This new gallery deals with, among other thing, the triangular trade in African slaves.