Posts

Twitter Search Bookmarklet

Throughout the day, I’m likely to search Twitter a number of times. Being the lazy person that I am, I got sick of opening a new tab, typing search.twitter.com, hitting enter, waiting for the page, then typing my term and waiting for results. I already have a couple of other bookmarklets that I use all the time (one for loading up a Google Map, one for jumping to a PHP function name in the online reference), so I figured I’d knock up something to search Twitter. I’m using Firefox on a Mac, YMMV.

  1. Bookmark any page (seriously, any page).
  2. Put that bookmark into your Bookmarks Toolbar.
  3. Right click it and select Properties
  4. Change the Name to something like “Search Twitter”
  5. Change the Location to this (copy and paste it): 
    javascript:var%20d=document,w=window,e=w.getSelection,k=d.getSelection,x=d.selection,s=(e?e():(k)?k():(x?x.createRange().text:0));if(!s.length){s=prompt('Search%20Twitter:','');}if(s){document.location.href='http://search.twitter.com/search?q='+escape(s);}else{void(0);}
  6. Save Changes

That’s it. Now click that link in your Bookmark Toolbar and it’ll prompt you for a search string. Enter anything and hit OK. If you happen to have some text on the page selected, it’ll automatically search for that text. Voila – Twitter Search.

FeedGrowler update: Custom icons

I’ve just updated the code for FeedGrowler so that it supports custom icons for each feed that you are monitoring. All you need to do is include the full path to an icon/image file as the second argument when you call feedgrowler.php (or in your crontab).

Custom icons for a WordPress feed, and a Twitter search.

Custom icons for a WordPress feed, and a Twitter search.

This version also supports Atom feeds (in addition to previous RSS 2.0 support).

Check out the latest FeedGrowler.

Alternative Uses for WordPress

WordPress, the most widely used blogging platform in the world, is built in a relatively content-agnostic way that means it’s suitable for all sorts of things, all it takes is a little bit of creativity and some theme/plugin hacking. I’ve decided to compile a list of alternative/slightly different uses for WordPress that I either see around the place, or that I come up with myself.

I’m not going to go into great detail on how to actually implement all of these ideas, I’m just putting them out there.

Read on for some different applications for WordPress

Balsamiq Mockups: Wireframes Made Easy (and Fun!)

I used to use OmniGraffle Pro for all of my diagramming needs, including for wireframes. When I needed to do some wireframing for a client, I decided it was about time I found some better stencils (pre-built shapes) for OmniGraffle so that I could get these things done more easily and consistently. That turned into a wild goose chase, which ended with OmniGraffle no longer loading properly and an approaching deadline to have my diagrams done. But then I found Balsamiq Mockups, and all was well. (more…)

Nokia E71 NAM Real World Usage Review

Now that I’ve been using the Nokia E71 NAM for a few weeks, I wanted to post a follow-up review covering some of the more “day-to-day reality” aspects of the phone. I’m going to bullet-point my observations/comments for brevity’s sake, and as with my initial review, any comparisons made here are as compared to my Nokia E61:
(more…)

An Open Letter to IE6 for 2009

Dear Internet Explorer 6,

How are you feeling? How was your New Years? Probably a bit lonely I expect, what with people deserting you left and right for your ritzy sibling, IE7, or some of the even more attractive kids on the block like Firefox, Safari and Opera. I know we’ve spent a lot of time together, you and I, but it’s time that I told you something that’s been on my mind for a while.

I don’t think we should see each other any more.

(more…)

Why Are You Still Paying for Cable TV?

When I first moved to the US, I moved into a fully-furnished apartment with 2 TVs. One of them occupied the cable connection where I wanted my computer plugged in, so that one got unplugged and never got turned on again. The other one was in the bedroom and only ever got turned on to watch my favorite show at the time: Alias. When I moved to California and was faced with the price of getting cable installed, I realized that I really didn’t want to pay that much money every month to watch 1 TV show. I preferred to watch DVDs and often watched video clips and things online though, so I needed a solution.

Instead of going and buying a TV, I went out and got a Mac Mini (with bluetooth keyboard/mouse), which I connected to a Toshiba projector. I got a 3 ft x 4ft blank (white) painting canvas, which hangs on the wall, opposite the projector (which is on top of my coffee table). A long (50ft, which turned out to be massive overkill) VGA cable runs around the edge of the room to the Mac Mini, which is housed with my (multi-region) DVD player etc under the screen in a standard IKEA cabinet.

I started out using Bit Torrent to download TV shows. I use the excellent program for Macs called Transmission, and experimented with a few different tools which worked by automatically downloading RSS feeds from tvRSS. I had Transmission set up with Speed Limits enabled so that it would only download overnight (when I wasn’t using my internet connection). This worked well for a while, but those freedom-hating Communists over at Comcast didn’t like that, so they started messing with my connection, which affected me day and night.

After battling with a bad connection for a while, I had to stop with the torrents because I was having trouble working. For a few months I just went without TV of any kind, which was actually refreshing in its own way. Then I got access to hulu.

hulu.com has made everything so much easier, and it’s even taken away that niggling feeling that I was doing something “wrong”. I can watch all sorts of things on hulu, even queue them up under my account so that I can keep track of new episodes easily. It’s available on-demand and I don’t care if I “miss” when a show was on normal TV, because I can watch it on hulu whenever I want.

Obviously I go without a lot of shows that are available on normal cable, but am I really missing anything? I sure don’t feel like it.

Challenges You Will Face When Working With Remote Teams

For a number of reasons at a number of times in my career, I’ve found myself working with variously-distributed teams of one kind or another. Perhaps the “office” is a building that spans 2 square miles, perhaps someone was working from home for a day or someone was on a 2 week “vacation”, or even working for a distributed company with no real office. These were all different situations, but they all suffered from simliar challenges. I want to take a look at a couple of those challenges and some ways that you can help mitigate them.

I’m looking at this mostly as a member of a technical team of some sort, but I’m sure a lot of it would apply to pretty much anyone who’s not working face-to-face with their colleagues. Apologies in advance for this being kind of rambling (and very long). It’s a collection of all sorts of observations, links and ideas that I’ve collected over time. (more…)