Monthly Archive for July, 2008

Ideas for my Council (update)

Guy Dickinson and I have submitted our proposal for “Ideas for My Council” to Building Democracy, a new initiative from the Democratic Engagement Branch of the Ministry of Justice (what a fantastic department name). The competition is not dissimilar to Show Us a Better Way from Tom Watson & co., to which we’ve also submitted this proposal. You can view our proposal on the Building Democracy site.

Various of the previous projects were run by the awesome My Society, e.g. Fax Your MP which became WriteToThem, so winners of this competition would be in good company. 

Fingers crossed.

Great presentations – or death to bullet points

I’ve spent a fair amount of the day today looking into fantastic presentations, and what makes them look fantastic. Presentations are really hard aren’t they? Getting up in front of people. Putting your points and ideas up there to be criticised. We need to give ourselves the best chance of interesting and engaging people, to increase the chances of a better.

Continue reading ‘Great presentations – or death to bullet points’

The first WordCamp UK was a cracker

I spent the weekend in the company of 50 or so other WordPress users, designers, developers, the odd Aussie Automattician, and a WordPress lead developer at the first WordCamp UK. It was great to meet a such a varied and interesting group of bloggers and blog makers, many of whom I’m going to have to wait until next year to properly talk to… a weekend is just too short!

Continue reading ‘The first WordCamp UK was a cracker’

Following hashtags with a Fluid app for Summize, errr, I mean Twitter Search

Just put together a quick Fluid app for Twitter Search. (Fluid is a Mac specific browser designed to be used with just one app, and together with it’s user scripts, think Grease Monkey, you can mimic basic application functionality.

I’ve just put one together which tracks the Twitter conversations around one Hashtag using the new Twitter search, and a Javascript which refreshes the window periodically.

To do this you will need to:

  1. Download Fluid
  2. Download the Twitter auto-reload script
  3. Download my lovely Hash Tag icon
  4. Open your Fluid app
  5. Enter the URL for your Twitter hashtag search, I’m at WordCamp UK so I entered: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23wordcampuk as the URL (you can obviously change the Hashtag in the search as appropriate).
  6. Give the Fluid app a memorable name
  7. Pick an icon (the one linked above is quite pretty)
  8. Click “Create”
  9. Select the curly script icon from the menubar (to the right of the “Window” menu) and choose “Open Userscripts Folder”
  10. Drop the Twitter auto-reload script into the folder (then close it)
  11. Go back to the script menu, and choose “Manage Userscripts”
  12. Check the box to enable”Auto reload”
  13. Ensure that Include has only one entry of “*” and Exclude is empty then close the dialog
  14. Refresh the window to kick off the new script (Apple+R)
Enjoy.

 

WordPress plugin development presentation

My presentation for WordCamp UK on WordPress Plugin Development (although I will update this soon with better slide notes): PDF version.

Ideas for my council

You can click on the mockup above, to see a full screen view of the mockup.

This mockup is part of a submission that Guy Dickinson of Participo and I are submitting for the UK Government’s “Show Us A Better Way“ competition to create innovative and socially useful applications with Government data.

Update: You can see the idea on the “Show Us a Better Way” site now, Ideas for My Council.

Update 2: Guy and I have now submitted this idea to the “Building Democracy” site. Fingers crossed (again).

Phew. My calendar is synced to my phone again

My phone used to sync with iCal several times a day, but when I upgraded to Leopard it wiped my cron tab file and all that goodness stopped. (Your crontab file is a way of scheduling tasks on your Mac using the Terminal application.) I’ve just googled around for the solution and found it again: Use cron to automate iSync at non-standard intervals. Nice neat solution, to which I would only add the following: 0 8,10,12,14 * * * osascript -e ‘tell application “iSync” to synchronize’ >> /dev/null Whenever a Cron command runs, any output is sent by email to the account handler. This simply builds up as unsendable email in the system, or spams you every time the script runs… either way it’s not good. The >> /dev/null simply sends any output into a black hole so it doesn’t bother me.

Originally I’m sure I had this set so iSync closed down again when it was done… so maybe more to follow.