Monthly Archive for July, 2008

Ideas for my Council (update)

Published on July 30, 2008 in Work. 0 Comments Tags: building democracy, councillors, democracy, government 2.0, ideas, ideas for my council, open innovation.

Guy Dickinson and I have submitted our proposal for “Ideas for My Council” to Building Democracy, a new initiative from theÂ 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.Â

FingersÂ crossed.

Great presentations – or death to bullet points

Published on July 24, 2008 in Work. 3 Comments Tags: communication, death to bullet points, dick hardt, keynote, lawrence lessig, powerpoint, presentation skills, presentations.

I’ve spent a fair amount of the day today looking into fantastic presentations, and what makes them look fantastic.Â 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

Published on July 21, 2008 in Work. 1 Comment Tags: all in one seo pack, bad behaviour, bbpress, benjamin ellis, bob jones, emma boakes, jonny a, rich boakes, richard williams, simon dickson, tony scott, wordcamp, wordcampuk, wordpress.

I spent the weekend in the company of 50 or so other WordPress users, designers, developers, the oddÂ Aussie Automattician, and aÂ WordPress lead developerÂ 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

Published on July 20, 2008 in Work. 5 Comments Tags: conversation, event, fluid, hashtag, os x, twitter, wordcamp uk.

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:

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

Enjoy.

WordPress plugin development presentation

Published on July 19, 2008 in Work. 1 Comment Tags: Development, presentation, web, wordcamp uk, wordpress, wordpress plugin.

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

Ideas for my council

Published on July 9, 2008 in Work. 4 Comments Tags: better democracy, competition, councillors, ideas for my council, mockup, show us a better way.

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“Â 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:Â 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

Published on July 7, 2008 in Work. 0 Comments Tags: cli, cron, crontab, isync, nix, os x, phone, schedule.

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:Â 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.