Weblog

By Tom Hodgkinson

10 most recent posts

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles — a review

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has just reached the end of its second season. The whole show has kept me reasonably well entertained, but the themes it has tried to tackle have occasionally delivered nuggets of real greatness. So I decided to write my thoughts down.

Read the rest of this entry...

Posted on 13 April | Comment on this post

Spotify playlists

I've built this little application to allow publication and sharing of Spotify playlists. There are others like it on the web, but this one is mine.

Features

  • an RSS feed for all playlists
  • pagination to avoid long pages
  • a record of the number of clicks for each playlist
  • the ability to sort by number of clicks or most recent click
  • a very poor search function
  • a page for each user that submits a playlist
  • an RSS feed for the same

Enjoy!

Posted on 24 February | Comment on this post

Citizen journalism

The recent Buffalo plane crash has thrown up some interesting nuggets of public investigation that I've so far yet to see in the news:-

Posted on 13 February | Comment on this post

The Fat Duck's Tasting Menu

For his 60th birthday, my brother and I took my dad to Heston Blumenthal's restaurant The Fat Duck. We ate the Tasting Menu and had a jolly nice time.

Nitro-green tea and lime mousse (2001)

Nitro-green tea and lime mousse (2001)

Our first course was prepared at the table: a spoonful of mousse swirled around in liquid nitrogen until it kinda turned into a fun-looking meringue. One dash of green tea powder and straight into the mouth, where it just about melted straight away with a burst of palette-cleansing wonderfulness. What a start!

Read the rest of this entry...

Posted on 10 February | Comment on this post

Robert Burns at the BBC

Seeing as how it's Burns Night tonight, here's a bit more information on my latest website launch at work.

Read the rest of this entry...

Posted on 25 January | Comment on this post

Negotiable instruments

Man pays fine with toilet paper (from Metro Weird) has finally given me an excuse to link to what is possibly my favourite Wikipedia page.

Posted on 17 December | Comment on this post

New websites at hodgers.com

Quite a few websites have joined the hodgers.com family recently:-

Karen Brookes
A beautiful hair salon in Giffnock
Presenting Property
Some really stylish Interior styling services and solutions
Craufurdland
A country estate specialising in ecological woodland burials
Bismarck & Herring Photography
The photography portfolio of longtime hodgers.com collaborator Steven Jones
Joel Kafetz
The personal website and showreel of the budding TV presenter

Posted on 21 May | Comment on this post

ELT08 Innovation Awards

The BBC Learning English Blogs - which run on the platform Ali and I developed - won in the UK category of the ELT08 Innovation Awards.

The Learning English Blogs transform the concept of blogging from an individual pursuit into a collaborative learning process.

The blogs retain a rich vein of individual expression since the ‘student blogger’ writes about topics of interest to them. A ‘teacher blogger’ prepares posts in response to the student’s writings giving feedback on good language use, specific student mistakes and typical language errors, all within the dynamic of a content-based, personalised and meaningful dialogue.

A global audience contributes to the learning by completing the teacher tasks, providing words of encouragement to the student and giving their opinions on not only language use but also the topics under discussion – a rich source of additional material for the teacher.

This process results in a simple one-to-one blogging relationship creating a one-to-many learning environment, that continues long after each blog post.

British Council website

You might remember this similar post a couple of years ago.

Posted on 10 March | Comment on this post

This is a page on hodgers.com, created by Tom Hodgkinson on November 22, 2008. You can bookmark it.