Running your webserver from home gives lots of opportunities to connect the real world to the internet.  I’ve previously connected a webcam with motion detection so I can see people entering and leaving the driveway and, more recently, connected a wireless weather station to give regular Elderslie weather updates.

I decided my next project would be to put my front doorbell online.  As well as being a relatively simple, fun project, it also makes some sense: coupled with the webcam it can be used to give me a decent idea of who’s there when the doorbell goes and I’m out.   It also means I can hear the doorbell when I’m at the bottom of the garden, thanks to SMS or IM alerts on my iPhone.

Here’s the project in it’s rough state, before it gets packaged up into a project case.

If you’re interested in setting up a similar project, read on…

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s1jobs has been shortlisted in the category of Online Excellence at the 2009 Marketing Excellence awards in Scotland.  The nomination covers the story of the development and marketing of the new site, which was the last major project I was involved with as Web Producer in s1.

The winners will be announced on May 29 — fingers crossed!

The Evening Times community sites – based on the ‘s1local’ content platform I developed over the past couple of years – have just been nominated for the 2009 Newspaper Awards.  

They’re in the category of Best Use of New Media:
http://www.newspaperawards.co.uk/markup/nominations.htm

My original ET community sites post is here: http://www.grantgibson.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/03/04/evening-times-local/

I’ve always been a fan of developing desktop and kiosk applications in Flash.  Many people see it as a web-only technology, but over the years it has matured into a very capable programming language.  And if you add on a third party extension such as Zinc or mProjector, Flash has all the file/registry/device capabilities of any other language.

My latest kiosk app is a re-working of GSC’s News Editor.   This time the client was the Scottish Crop Research Institute and the subject was the GM debate.   The original plan had been to create a kiosk-only application, but in the end we decided to export a web version too.  Because everything was based on web technologies (Flash, JPEG, PNG, etc) the only thing that had to change was the compression level of the video files.  The web export added just a few hours to the overall project, but resulted in a far wider reach for the application.  

You can try it out here: http://www.scri.ac.uk/knowledge/games/youchoosethenews