Roviyas

Easing Into 2013 Like a Hippo Into a Pool of Jelly

"You can see my front door from here!" I squealed.

Lydia and Lowri peered into the distance.

"And you can see your flat too, Lowri!"

We were standing on a terraced bit at the top of Lydias new block of flats, even though the many, many signs all told us very clearly that it was "Private Property" and most definitely "Not A Communal Area".

"Oh yes!" said Lowri. "There are the little white lines around its windows."

She squinted affectionately at the red brick monolith for a moment. "Look at its little eyebrows" she added.

Lydia took a thoughtful drag of her cigarette.

"We definitely have to do the yoghurt pots thing. We could easily get string between our three flats. Easily."

We had been drinking coffee at Lydias and had come out to scout the location for a filmette* were making for our next Eggs Collective outing to Mothers Ruin Theatrical Spectacular in February. This, we quickly decided, would be perfect, although from a slightly different position you would get B&M Bargains and Moss Side Leisure Centre in the background, which was unanimously agreed to be a good thing.

*definitely not a word

It was bloody freezing up there, though, so we didnt stay long. As we made our way back down the spiral stairs to Lydias flat we mused on the really important aspect of the performance: what to wear.

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I came to a sad but definite conclusion this week: I should not be a Zumba teacher. This has little to do with my general lack of co-ordination/fitness/pep and a lot to do with my unfortunate tendency to go startlingly pink-faced at the merest whiff of cardiovascular activity. Every aerobics lesson I have ill-advisedly stumbled into has contained a bouncy, lycra-ridden instructor wearing some kind of bright pink endeavour. When I wore a bright pink top to a Zumba class last week I very quickly began to lose any t-shirt/face distinction. After a quick scan of the room I swiftly realized I was the only one suffering quite so dramatically from this affliction, even though Lydia was going through her own torment after receiving the wrong answer to the question "do you think therell be a fag break?".

Its a shame in a way, because I think I would enjoy being a Zumba teacher. As a Zumba teacher you can make whole rooms full of people do absolutely anything you like, including something called "The Rocking Horse" and some very dubious pelvic thrusting to MC Hammers Hammer Time.

I loved Zumba. Unlike normal aerobics where there is some kind of sadistic insistence on "getting it right", in Zumba you can just leap about and do what you want, as long as you dont get in the way of other leapers too much.

We are going again this week. I might wear a different coloured top.


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Ben is going to Australia in a few weeks, touring festivals for two months with his show. Two months!

Two months.

I have a lot to do, and have made lots of plans. I am sort of excited to live on my own in my exciting city, close to friends, with loads of exciting performance and writing stuff in the pipeline. I am picturing myself as a sort of North-of-England, all-singing all-writing Carrie Bradshaw, only hopefully not as much of an unremitting dick.

Im excited for Ben. Im excited for me. But Im also sad for us both, because we like each other lots and I really sense that he thrives on having someone to cook dinner for.

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I havent been blogging because I have felt weird about it. I have been trying to be all Business about it and think of this blog as a Promotional Tool but when I try to write about career stuff here I feel like a massive tool myself, so I think Ill save that stuff for my website (HERE IS MY WEBSITE) and write on here about things that wander through my brain, aimless and bemused as a cow in Primark.

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Oh, yeah, and happy new year. May 2013 be your year, you bloody gorgeous winner, you.

Available link for download

Expansion of Early Islamic Empire Reading Like a Historian

The Stanford History Education Group  (SHEG) has an excellent lesson on the spread of the early Islamic empire with primary documents. You can see the documents below but you should go to the SHEG site to download the teacher material.

If you have never used Stanfords resources, you should definitely check them out. Their documents are terrific and always include good scaffolding instructions.

For this lesson, students consider how the Islamic Empire spread.

Available link for download

Facebook Check if user clicked Like page button just liked the Facebook page

Very often Facebook applications have "Fangate" page, meaning that if user hasnt liked the page and if he opened application - he can see application page with text something like "Please like our Facebook page before using the app" and cant use the application until he is not page fan.

Our clients as usual ask us to track how many users liked the page from the application.

Signed request contains an information about if user like a page:

$facebook = new Facebook(array(
 appId => $app_id,
 secret => $app_secret,
 cookie => true
));

$signed_request = $facebook->getSignedRequest();
$like_status = $signed_request["page"]["liked"];

So, the challenge is to catch the moment when user clicks like button.

The simples way is to store like status to the session. But it doesnt work in Safari, for iframe Facebook applications Safari doesnt accept cookies and user session is lost.

Nowadays most of polar browsers support local storage. So we can use it to store like status information. Example of source code is pretty simple.

This code example should be in template that is rendered if user is a fan of Facebook page:

<script type="text/javascript">
 if (localStorage in window && window[localStorage] !== null) {
 if (localStorage.getItem(liked_state) == 0) {
 // weve go it: user just clicked like button
 }

 localStorage.setItem(liked_state, 1);
 }
</script>

Pretty simple, isnt it?

Available link for download