Martin Joiner's Blog Confessions of a binge thinker
26 May 2022

Redefining what Open Mic Finder is to me

I first published the open mic finder website way back in January 2010. Within a few years it was the top resource for information on open mic nights in the United Kingdom. A few months ago I was about to shut it down permanently, but then I changed my mind. One thing that's always been […]… Read more »
Filed under: The Web
14 September 2020

Bristol Street Art

Pelmo's first show at Upfest Gallery in March 2020 became the longest running "featured artist" show ever because days before the show was due to be taken down having completed it's 1 month run, the country went into national lockdown and the shop closed it's doors for months. The art by Bristol Street Artist, Pelmo […]… Read more »
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged as:
24 May 2020

MTN 94 GIMP Palette

I have started an open source repository of GIMP palette files (.glp) for all the major ranges of street art paint. The first range I've added is my personal favourite MTN 94. It would be good to get palettes for all the major ranges covered included other brands like Molotow and Posca. Contributions welcomed. Download […]… Read more »
Filed under: Art
30 December 2019
Martin speaking at event

Dependency Version Constraints Talk at PHP SW

In November 2019 I delivered a talk at Bristol tech meetup PHP South West covering a small but very useful piece of knowledge. NPM and Composer kind of hit critical popularity at the same time. By 2013/14 a package manager was an integral part of web development if you wanted to use all the shiny […]… Read more »
Filed under: The Web
4 May 2018
Martin stood in front of presentation screen

Speedy Seeding: Lightning talk at PHP SW

Earlier this month I spoke at local developer meetup PHP South West. My lightning talk at focussed on making seeding loads of data quick and painless so as not to discourage yourself from optimising your application.… Read more »
Filed under: The Web
30 January 2018

Krishnan Guru-Murthy’s Tie – 30th Jan 2018

It's been nearly 7 years since Krishnan rocked his attention-grabbing, machine-gun-toting cherub tie in the blue-on-pink colourway on Channel 4 news. Well tonight, thanks to a comment on that 2010 blog post, I was alerted to the fact that he's a return customer at kick-ass tie retailer, Gresham Blake.… Read more »
Filed under: Life Tagged as:
31 August 2017

Why I think it’s fine to ask a mobile user to “Click”

I wrote a guest opinion piece for TechSpark, check it out: https://techspark.co/fine-ask-mobile-user-click/… Read more »
Filed under: The Web
5 July 2017

A pre-commit hook to block tab-indented code

Avoiding tab-indentation is the best way to ensure code looks the same on all code editors/viewers including Mac, Windows, Vim and the GitHub website. I made a Git pre-commit hook that lints your newly added lines for tab indentation and stops the commit if it finds any.… Read more »
Filed under: The Web Tagged as:
13 February 2017

Jade Templating Engine Renamed to Pug

Playing with the Express framework on a Node.js project I was encouraged by Express's documentation to bootstrap my new project with the Jade templating engine. I'd never used Jade before but I liked what came out the box! Diving deeper and hungry for official documentation I searched the term "jade templating" on duckduckgo.com and scanned my […]… Read more »
Filed under: The Web Tagged as:
2 February 2017

Utilising the GoodReads API on BookFetch

The biggest problem revealed after Saturdays test of the BookFetch scanner was the systems inability to lookup 60% of the scanned barcodes on the ISBNdb.com API. Owen, a friend in the local Bristol tech community suggested giving GoodReads.com's API a try. I added a fallback in the code that processes the scans so that if it should […]… Read more »
Filed under: The Web Tagged as:
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