Skilmo - like FourSquare but for crafts and hobbies

Since last October I've been working on developing a crafts and skills website, and its quite presentable now. Its called SKILMO


Its like Foursquare or Indie Eyespy, but for crafts, skills and hobbies, so instead of getting points for checking off places you've been or people you've seen, you get point for learning to knit, or do origami, or playing guitar.

For me, the site has been a voyage of discovery in html, php, javascript and css, learning new tricks and figuring out how to do things. Adding more and more features as they become necessary.

But for you, the user, its just supposed to look nice and be easy to use. Feel free to have a click around

At weekends it has a lovely Morrison tartan background rendered in css, but during the week, it has a more sensible polka dot or checked pattern, except on Thurdays when its all floating flowers.

Signing up

Anyhoo, say you think yourself a crafty, arty kind of soul, then feel free to sign up. You'll need to click on the 'Register here' link on the home page, and it will take you to the great checklist of skills.

The list is a bit comprehensive and long so its got all the skills grouped into many categories. Graphic Arts for things like drawing, painting and printing; Textile Arts for knitting, crochet, cross-stitch and so forth; Photography for various genres, achievements and skills; Music for different musical instruments and performance related achievements.

You don't have to check off everything, you can add more strings to your bow later.

When you're content, click on one of the 'Calculate score' buttons. That will calculate how many points your skills are worth. The theory is that the more esoteric your skills are, the more points they're worth.

From the score page you'll be able to chose a username and password and sign up, so you can come back later and add more skills and crafts. You don't have to sign up, its not a biggie.

Members

Anyhoo, if you sign up with a username, you'll show up on the 'Members' page, and you'll have a profile page which lists all the skills you've checked off, and will let you upload jpeg images of the stuff you've done.

To check off more skills, like if you learn how to do double knitting, or manage to play a sold-out gig, or even figure out what chromolithography is, you can either go back to the checklist page, or you can go through the 'Categories' link to find the page for that specific skill, and then click on the 'I can do this skill' button.

There isn't much to stop you from just clicking on everything, and racking up all the points, except no one will believe you. You can prove you've done stuff, or just show off your first efforts at new crafts by uploading photos. At the moment the site only accepts jpegs and can only upload photos for skills that you've already checked off.

Photos

Once you've uploaded  images, there's this awesome whole side of the website where you can browse all the photos that anyone's uploaded and upvote or downvote the best and worst.

For each picture, you can see the top five highest rated images for that skill and the top five highest rated images uploaded by that user.

So you'll be able to spend literally minutes browsing through literally dozens of photos of skills and crafts.

You might be inspired to try something new, or make something better.

These crafts and skills aren't difficult, anyone/everyone can do them.

And beyond

So I mostly created the site off my own back, with a bit of guidance on css from Robbie, without whom the site would still look like this.

There's still loads of functionality I ought to add, but really I could do with more people using the site and playing around with it, and finding bugs and problems, and little bits that could be better, easier, and more intuitive.

Londonland Rents - A year later

One of the most popular posts on this site, as you can see from the sidebar, is my post from May 2012 about the average rents in each London borough. Admittedly a lot of traffic comes from google sending people here looking for a map of London boroughs, but anyhoo, its still an interesting topic.

The other day, on twitter, Sarah retweeted comment from Emma Jackson about how rents in London were crazy and average rents in Newham had shot up 39% the last year. Alas this information came from a press release a year ago, but it got me wondering about what rents were like now that the Olympics is firmly in the past, and how rents have changed from last year.

So I dug out my old spreadsheet, went through the rightmove.com property website, and counted up how many two bedroom flats there were in each London borough at each price point, weaved some Excel magic and well here's a list of average rents last year and this year, and their percentage change.

Borough	10 May 2012	08 May 2013	Change
Merton	£   1,581.29	£   1,766.93	111.74%
Redbridge	£   1,080.05	£   1,193.77	110.53%
Hillington	£   1,112.92	£   1,201.08	107.92%
Bexley	£     858.70	£     914.26	106.47%
Enfield	£   1,135.41	£   1,201.74	105.84%
Croydon	£   1,014.19	£   1,063.27	104.84%
Westminster	£   2,796.06	£   2,918.95	104.40%
Greenwich	£   1,332.97	£   1,387.40	104.08%
Waltham Forest	£   1,092.00	£   1,134.49	103.89%
Barnet	£   1,419.80	£   1,465.49	103.22%
Southwark	£   1,840.94	£   1,899.17	103.16%
Barking	£     967.14	£     994.93	102.87%
Kensington and Chelsea	£   2,856.73	£   2,907.43	101.77%
Ealing	£   1,578.19	£   1,606.16	101.77%
Sutton	£   1,029.41	£   1,046.86	101.70%
Hounslow	£   1,785.18	£   1,808.97	101.33%
Hackney	£   1,876.80	£   1,898.31	101.15%
Lewisham	£   1,224.56	£   1,236.24	100.95%
Camden	£   2,359.67	£   2,375.90	100.69%
Kingston Upon Thames	£   1,402.73	£   1,412.13	100.67%
Brent	£   1,483.54	£   1,491.47	100.53%
Harrow	£   1,248.56	£   1,253.38	100.39%
Bromley	£   1,127.81	£   1,131.87	100.36%
Havering	£     967.49	£     963.83	99.62%
Islington	£   2,217.82	£   2,185.26	98.53%
Lambeth	£   1,745.46	£   1,708.09	97.86%
Haringey	£   1,432.51	£   1,401.14	97.81%
Richmond	£   1,927.33	£   1,878.68	97.48%
Tower Hamlets	£   2,066.11	£   2,011.83	97.37%
Newham	£   1,410.63	£   1,373.49	97.37%
Wandsworth	£   1,844.08	£   1,756.62	95.26%
Hammersmith and Fulham	£   2,102.78	£   1,993.76	94.82%
City of London	£   2,817.34	£   2,474.32	87.82%

Its perhaps more useful to see this on a map,

So average rents for two bedroom properties have risen in most of the suburban boroughs, broadly in line with inflation, and average rents for two bedroom properties nearer the centre of town have fallen, but its a mixed bag. One wonders why.

At this point I'd like to announce a new statistical product, GilMove Index of Average London Rent levels for two bedroom properties. This is basically the percentage the market has moved for the whole of London from a benchmark set in May 2012.

The GilMove Index for May 2013 is 103.31

That is, based on data scraped from RightMove.com for the whole of London average rents have risen by 3.31% With inflation in mind that's broadly to be expected.

Right now, RightMove.com lists about 29,500 properties in London, that's up 6,300 from a year ago, or 27.3%. Well done London. If there's a shortage of houses, the problem is being addressed.

Westminster seems to have over a thousand more properties on the market since last year, from 2,200 in May 2012 to 3,500 in May 2013. Is it because they evicted all the social tenants and put the properties in the private sector? Seems unlikely that that would account for so many properties, a few hundred I could understand.

Other boroughs with huge increases of  two bed properties on the market are Kensington and Chelsea with around 800 more, Camden with around 600 more and Richmond with 500 more.

So, could it be that in areas where more properties have come onto the market since last year, the average rents have changed the most. That there is some kind of correlation between these two things? Well, no. I ran the numbers and is absolutely no correlation between the two variables.

The only correlation I can see is that boroughs with very few two bedroom properties on the market have the lowest average rents, and boroughs with the most properties on the market have the highest rents.

I guess its a relatively free market, with supply and demand acting as they do. Less desirably places are cheap and with not much going down, desirably places are in demand and have lots of properties available.

Anywho, it was all pretty settled, until on Friday there was a tweet from a chap called Murray who was tweeting a link to an article in the Evening Standard about how in order to afford to rent a one bedroom property in London, you'd need an annual income of £38,000, and average income in the UK is £26,000.

Alarm bells in my head started ringing, firstly, its based on a government diktat that you ought to only spend a third of your income on rent, which is fine if you acknowledge it, but not really relevant to the way people live their lives. Some people will want to spend a greater proportion on their earnings on a more desirable location, some people may be willing to live in a cheap place to allocate their resources elsewhere. People are free to spend their money in many different ways. It riles me when the government says I can't afford something when clearly I'm in a better position to decide.

Secondly, it seems a bit rum to compare national wages with regional rents, London prices are almost like being in a different country to the rest of the UK. A more appropriate comparison would be London rents to the average wage in London, a bit of googling had the London mean wage being £40,000, so no problem renting an average one bedroom property.

Of course its arguable that you should use the median wage rather than the mean which is hellish skewed in London. But then the property market is similarly skewed, so you should use the median rent for a valid comparison.

Look, mean average one bedroom rents in Motherwell are £348 per month, you'd need to earn about half the average income to afford one, you could afford one if you had a minimum wage job without much of a struggle.

Anywho, I quickly clicked through Murray's link to find the Evening Standard with a rather short sensational article about London rents and wages.

The figure follows a Standard report last month that revealed rents in the capital are rising eight times faster than wages.

Wait... what. I've already established that rents in various London boroughs are all over the place, some rising, some falling and generally the rise is in line with inflation, 3.31%. But even then, we're getting toward the margin of error to say that average national wages are only rising at 0.41%. Its a bit of a stretch.

It seems the latest Evening Standard article just reproduces a press release from a website called Rentonomy which is...

an easy-to-use site that looks at London in a totally new way and gives you all the tools you need to find the right area for you

Awesomeness!

However I question Rentonomy's director of research, David Butler's use of national average wages for regional rents. Its inappropriate, sensationalistic, and crap.

The original Evening Standard article from April uses rent data from a different source lettings agency network LSL Property Services. They quote

Last month the average monthly rent in London stood at £1106, a rise of 7.9 per cent in a year and the highest level ever recorded.

I don't have my own data for rent levels in April 2013 or April 2012, so I can't vouch for its accuracy, but LSL's figures seem way different from rent levels from my figures from May to May. Maybe that's the figure for all properties, regardless of number of bedrooms. *shrug*

David Newnes, director of LSL Property Services, owners of estate agents Reeds Rains and Your Move, seems a bit disingenuous when he says:-

“Rents in London are red-hot. With only modest improvements in the UK’s housing supply, rents will keep being forced upwards.”

As I have previously established, London rents are nothing special compared to a year ago, more stable than in the Olympic year, were rents in London white-hot in 2012? Also, the London housing supply seems to have increased in several boroughs since last year. Up 27% overall, how is that 'modest', I reckon 'dramatic' would be a better word.

Maybe, it's all happened in the last month, and he was right back in April.

References
Source data on google spreadsheet here
Scraped from the RightMove property website

Thick Creamy Podcast 29-03-2013

Here's the sixteenth Thick Creamy Podcast, bands playing live at the Sounds XP Easter alldayer and me talking.

RIGHT CLICK SAVE AS

The bands were recorded live at the Windmill in Brixton, there were loads of bands playing, but I only taped four of them; Simon Love, No Cars, Viv Albertine and Big Wave.

Plimptons final show bootleg

It was the final ever Plimptons show last Saturday, and it was great, I know cos I was there with my digital recorder. I didn't record all the set mind, cos that would detract from the fragility and transience of the live music environment, if you wanted to hear it all, you should have been there.

Anyhoo, here are the tracks I did bootleg, have y'self a rightclick save as

Drink Y'self Sober
I Learned to Dance
Help the State
Animals and Rockin in 99
Pride comes before a fall
Everyone knows everyone else

If you listen carefully you'll hear in the background me, the missus and Alan speculating on the nature of the universe.

Praying to false gods

Oh, I used to have a passion for blogging. I used to churn out writings all hours of the day on all topics that bubbled up, from the state of my jobbies, to the vagaries of the UK jobs market. I used to think it all meant something, that it was gently prodding my readers and society in some positive direction.

But as I've grown older, and faced the trauma of unemployment and just plain getting on with life, its all faded away. I no longer have the passion to write.

Other people do.

I still read blogs, I still click on links on twitter, but its all like a sheet of tracing paper has been placed over it all, its all opaque. Its less meaningful. Its just plain wrong.

Moments ago the member of parliament for West Bromwich East, Tom Watson re-tweeted a link to the No More Page 3 campaign's blog.

At this point I should point out that I don't buy The Sun newspaper, and when it is the only newspaper lying around in the canteen at work, I skip past page 3. Although, I fully appreciate that it is the most popular newspaper in the UK and that it arguably represents a centrist political viewpoint.

Anyhoo, the thrust of the No More Page 3 campaign blogpost seems to be that if only The Sun newspaper stopped publishing photos of topless women on page three then 13 to 16 year old girls wouldn't have their skirts lifted by teenage boys in the queue at the school canteen.

I think this is foolish. There's plenty of nudity and objectifying women in every other newspaper and magazine. The are plenty of websites that offer nudity for free.

Stopping page three will do nothing to stop teenage boys lifting girl's skirts.

Why are schools tolerating sexual abuse in their canteens? Why aren't teachers and headmasters disciplining teenage boys and educating them in the acceptable ways to behave in polite society.

What makes a 16 year old girl think that banning a page in a newspaper will change the behaviour of teenage boys? Its just so tenuous that it astounds me.

Does the member of parliament for West Bromwich East actually agree and believe that if The Sun newspaper stopped printing titties in their newspaper then it would affect the behaviour of teenage boys? Does he actually think this?
Does he really think that cause and effect work like this?
Is this really the sort of belief that the residents of West Bromwich East want in their representative in parliament?

I spent most of this morning investigating the tabloid monstering of Lucy Meadows. There's a variety of petitions out at the moment lobbying for the Daily Mail to sack their columnist Richard LittleJohn.

At this point I should point out that I don't buy the Daily Mail newspaper, and on the rare occasions where I have the opportunity and inclination to read it, I usually skip past the columnist pages. Although I do appreciate that its the second most popular newspaper in the UK.

I'm still unclear as to what degree Richard Littlejohn monstered Lucy Meadows. He wrote a column about her, but the press intrusion that she complained about wasn't about opinion pieces, it was closer to home. She wrote a series of emails to a friend as follows (source):

I was lucky to have a supportive head, but I think I’d have done it here regardless as I couldn’t put it off any longer and I have family and financial commitments as well. The guidance I’ve had from the trans community has been generally sound and very much appreciated, and I’d like to be able to say I’ve given something back. I suppose the best way for me to do this would be to educate the people around me and children at school – I am a teacher after all!
[...]
I know the press offered parents money if they could get a picture of me.
[...]
I became pretty good at avoiding the press before Christmas. I live about a three-minute walk from school so they were parked outside my house as well as school. I’m just glad they didn’t realise I also have a back door. I was usually in school before the press arrived and stayed until late so I could avoid them going home.
[...]
[M]any parents have been quite annoyed with the press, too, especially those that were trying to give positive comments but were turned away.

Richard Littlejohn isn't a reporter, the sort of intrusion that Lucy was talking about seems to be the work of people like:-

• Lisa Woodhouse from The Lancashire Telegraph
• Stuart Pike of the Accrington Observer / Manchester Evening News
• James Tozer and Nazia Parveen the Daily Mail's northwest correspondants.

I see no petitions calling for these people to be sacked.

Even if Littlejohn's career did meet an untimely demise, then Lisa Woodhouse, Stuart Pike, James Tozer and Nazia Parveen would still camp on people's doorsteps, and wait outside their places of work, and hassle parents for photos and juicy details. At no point in their line of work would they think, "I better not do this, remember what happened to Littlejohn". That isn't going to cross their mind, ever.

Here's a picture of Stuart Pike, and presumably his wife Alia Pike, that I grabbed from his Facebook page. How much guilt does his feel for the death of Lucy Meadows? Is he wondering if he'd done something different, Lucy would still be alive, the pupils of St Mary Magdalen's School in Accrington wouldn't be mourning the loss of a popular teacher.

This is Lisa Woodhouse from the Lancashire Telegraph, I ripped her photo from her twitter account, although for a journalist, she doesn't tweet much. I can't find her on Facebook, so I'm guessing she's got something to hide.

This is 30 year old Nazia Parveen from The Daily Mail, I ripped her photo from twitter. She was named Young Journalist of the year in 2011, when she worked at the Lancashire Telegraph. Her prize for being a young journalist was £500 and a week's work experience at The Daily Mail, presumably they liked her work.

Anyhoo, my point is, that rather than tenuously going for trophy heads on spikes to change behaviour and society, people should be going for the people who commit the offences.

If 16 year old boys are abusing 16 year old girls, then discipline the specific 16 year old boys rather than signing a petition about a page in a newspaper.

If tabloid reporters are hassling someone to the point of suicide, then have a go at the tabloid reporters who are doing the hassling, rather than signing a petition about a page in a newspaper.

*** UPDATE1 *** 24/03/2013 13:44
Just to be sure, I used twitter:-

Eagerly awaiting a response.

*** UPDATE2 *** 24/03/2013 15:17
Looking through other tabloids for reporters who may have monstered Lucy Meadows, I find that in The Mirror, reporter Steve White reports Lucy Meadows's death with the headline "Nathan Upton: Sex-change teacher found dead at 32".

Its a little unclear why Steve White is referring to Lucy as Nathan, when the main thrust of the story, of both the sex change and the suicide, is that Lucy wished to be referred to as Lucy, not Nathan.

30Km walk to Rough Trade

My 2013 exercise regime has now taken me on a 30 km walk.

I wandered up my usual route up to Tottenham Hale, then a Veronica Falls song came on my ipod, so I figured I ought to walk down to Rough Trade in Brick Lane and get the new album, so I strolled down the A10 through Stoke Newington and Hoxton.

It got there in good time, almost persuaded myself to buy a Korg Monotron, but chickened out.

On the way back I went via Victoria Park then back up the River Lea by the Olympic park. There was a dead fox floating. When I went to get a photo, two swans swam up and started showing off, so I ran away.

So 30 km (18.6 miles) in 4:54:20

2012 in numbers

Just a tote of various personal numbers and statistics from last year. Could really do with being an infographic, maybe later.


Weight change
+6 Kg

Distance walked or run (exercise)
385 miles
(164 miles in 2011)

Distance travelled by car
8197 miles (5803 miles approx in 2011)

Petrol Spend
£1014.85 - 758 litres
(£724.00 in 2011)

Foot/car ratio
1:21
(1:35 in 2011)

Distance flown
2876 miles

CO2 emissions from travel
1587 Kg
(Air - @0.21 Kg/mile; Road - @0.115 Kg/mile; Foot - @0.105 Kg/mile)

Change in wealth
+£6393.93
(+£5389.49 in 2011)

Stocks & Shares change
+9.58%

Gigs attended
20
(15 in 2011)

Gigs played
1
(nil in 2011)

Songs recorded
3

Programming, markup and scripting languages used
8 (Java, Javascript, Python, html, php, SQL, R, CSS)

Xbox games completed
7

Websites created
4

Website unique visitors
13600

Items knitted or crocheted
5