simoncross.com

I'm a principal web developer for the BBC. This means I work on loads the building blocks of bbc.co.uk. Currently, I'm focussed on UI Frameworks and social media applications on top of the Semantic Web. I live and work in London.

Previously, I was a senior web developer for the Audio and Music part of the BBC working with sites like Radio 1 and Asian Network, as well as on events like Glastonbury and TV Shows like Later... with Jools Holland. I've worked on projects as diverse as bog standard websites, IPTV, podcasting or mobile devices.

Before joining the BBC, I worked at Chrysalis Radio (now Global Radio) as a Broadcast Engineer and web developer. I was involved the AudioAgain podcasting platform, studio builds and outside broadcasts. If you want to know more about this kind of work, I suggest you read the excellent book "How to build a Radio Station".

I occasionally Blog along with some of my colleagues at the BBC Radio Labs Blog. I normally code in PHP (including CakePHP and the Zend Framework), XHTML, CSS, Javascript and Ruby on Rails.

Blog

  1. 4 days ago

    is exploring all the cool places he's going to visit in NZ on Google Earth. Its like being here. But more rubbish.

  2. My preso to the BBC's Semantic Web interest group

    1 month ago

    Honeypot to Semantic Web interest group at the BBC From: sicross, 1 day ago Honeypot to Semantic Web interest group at the BBCview presentation (tags: bbc semantic web foaf) SlideShare Link

  3. Installing the Facebook Open Platform

    1 month ago

    Facebook is cool. It's a little past its best now (it may be seen as 2007's YoYo) but the technology underneath it is proven, scalable and solves many of the problems any site wanting to introduce some 'magic social dust' contains. Now, Facebook have released their Facebook Open Platform. This looks interesting. Not sure what I can do with it yet, but its a nice thing to start messing around

  4. How to Quit Twitteriffic

    1 month ago

    Twitterific rocks. Its simple, cool, and once you have Growl installed, its not as annoying. Still, sometimes it goes wrong and you need to quit it. This isn't obviously apparent as applications which sit in the menubar don't show up in the Force Quit menu (which you get by pressing Apple+Alt+Esc). Normally you can quit Twitterific using the Quit Twitterific command in the 'spanner' or 'wrench'

  5. More on Grids

    4 months ago

    The more I read about this subject, the more interesting it becomes. Try this presentation by Khol Vlnh at SXSW Interactive last year. Well, that's why we use grids. Then try Mark Boulton's post about Blueprint. Not sure I agree with all of this tho (as per my previous post). And then theres this.... http://webpatterns.org/. Its not there yet, but looks very cool.

  6. Wrestling with CSS Frameworks

    4 months ago

    Say you're working on a project where you need to standardise your entire layout to a grid system, and you want your entire organisation to conform to this in a single way in code? Not easy. Everyone does their layout differently, but it looks the same! Why do this, why not code the same way to make things look the same. The best way, the right way. Granted this doesn't work for decor,

  7. CakePHP Tree Behaviour

    4 months ago

    Its often really useful to be able to represent data in a tree, or self-referential way - like product categories, music genres, organisational structures etc. Often, that takes quite a bit of code. However thanks to CakePHP, we can do it in far less lines of code, thanks to a behavior var $actsAs = array('Tree');. First create a db table as normal with an id and title. Then add three special

  8. Text to Speech

    4 months ago

    Now this is incredible. http://www.cereproc.com/demo.html And this... https://www.cepstral.com/demos/ Text to speech has come on a long way from the Stephen Hawking-esq stuff of the 80's. Wanna have a real play? Make George W Bush say some dodgy stuff in this demo.

  9. HABTM Relationship building in CakePHP

    5 months ago

    Yeah, I know its not as good as rails, but i'm trying to get to grips with it anyway: CakePHP. I'm gonna start using this blog as a way of keeping a note of things I learn as I build my first apps - mainly for my own benefit, but also to help the active and very friendly CakePHP community. Documentation for 1.2 is currently shocking, so it takes a lot of trawling to get what you need - so I need

  10. Draggable EPG

    5 months ago

    So I've been playing with re-creating a google maps style draggable interface for time-based data - anything you can plot with time on the X axis. Looking around for data to try, I thought I'd give 'schedule' data a try. The cool stuff here is the JS/CSS stuff I've built which allows you to drag around an infinite-size surface, and the JS which interprets the users interactions, and loads in new

  11. At Over the Air

    5 months ago

    So, today, I'm here... http://overtheair.org/blog/ Which is nice. I'm not staying overnight tho, thats for the proper geeks. We're here with a bunch of people from the BBC including Jason Quinn, Fraser Pearce, Tristan Fearne, Matt Wood, Paul Clifford, Chris Yanda et al. We're planning on going to a few sessions, taking a few pics, and doing some mobile web hacking. How much of each we'll see.

  12. GSV: Pan & Scan

    5 months ago

    Wanna make your own Google Maps style viewer for massive images? Checkout Pan & Scan. I'm currently trying to build a draggable electronic programme guide interface, and this has given me loads of ideas.... Principally that rather than relying on widths and floats, I need to absolutely position everything to make it work - this is because a) you can't reliably apply heights and widths to inline

  13. Freesat is nearly here

    5 months ago

    So the TV aerial on my new house is rubbish. Watching Eastenders which freezes every 3 seconds is more annoying than watching the real thing. I invited a company to come round and take a look. Even thought I'd told them the aerial was on the 4th floor, they still turned up, told me it was 'too high' and that I now needed to pay them a £30 callout charge. If I really wanted them to fix it, it'll

  14. Google Earth Flight Simulator

    5 months ago

    So if Google Earth wasn't good enough, they then released Google Sky. But they got bored of that, and now, hidden away inside the latest version of Google Earth is an awesome flight simulator. No, seriously, they're just taking the p*** now. Its well worth trying out. Download Google Earth, install it, and when its up and running hit Option + Apple + A on a mac, or Ctrl+Alt+A on a PC. And let