Six degrees of seperation rapidly becoming three

 Entertainment, Social Media  No Responses »
Jul 302010
 

Are you still surprised when you discover a friend on a new social network?  The number of useful social media sites is growing.  Specialist sites for our interests help keep us focused as opposed to facebook and twitter.

3736525 s 300x200 Six degrees of seperation rapidly becoming threeYou have to be specific to be terrific, as my mentor used to say.  Facebook and Twitter are great just so long as you have a good tool to agrregate the data (sly reference to PalRelay).

I recently joined SoundCloud and managed to get martynwalker as a username.  A couple of days later I was contacted by an old school buddy.

How valuable is that? A school friend not spoken to since 1974 contacted me and we enjoyed a 36 year catchup that we couldn’t hoped to have done without social media.

He found me as I favourited a musician we both like and my username rang a bell (or should that be a triangle?).

Kty West Wildlife Artist

 Tech, Video  No Responses »
Jul 282010
 

Kty is beginning a new website and wanted a PDF handout to demonstrate her work. Still in its infancy stages I have helped her assemble a few of the features of her WordPress website, these include.

  • A new WordPress template
  • A commercial auction plugin for her charity work
  • I created WordPress plugin specifically for Kty
  • A short video (see low res youtube version below)
  • A downloadable PDF with embedded video

You can see Kty’s website at http:/www.ktywest.co.uk/

Google no longer offers encrypted search?

 Google Software, Software  1 Response »
Jul 282010
 

Have I done something wrong? I tried in FF, IE and Chrome but this is what I get now when I try change to https:-

sgoog Google no longer offers encrypted search?

It flips right back ignoring my search preferences and even typing it manually makes no difference.

I was using it to debug a local proxy handling SSL requests and it took a while to realise why I could see nothing on 443.

I think I can live with out it but those folks performing searches they do not want their ISP or any of the node-holders in between to see might be upset at this silent change. While we freely give (and trust) Google with our search string the thought our ISP can store it and pass it on to third parties can be a disturbing.

If BT see a lot of people searching for a new broadband provider in a particular area that information could be used to decide on the viability of investing in better equipment. Is that fair?

I don’t know what fair use is but they could use the data in other ways. What if they detect people are not happy with a local supplier, your ISP could use that to bring in a new supplier. The locals then get more options, so that has to be good right?

Sometimes it’s good to stop and think about things we take for granted.

The best wiki for customisation

 CSS, On The Front Line, Programming, Wiki  No Responses »
Jul 132010
 

wiki’s make it easy to edit through the browser. I like everything about them except for two irritating problems.

  • They all look the same
  • They are not easy to customise

Both problems now solved by wikkawiki.

It remains a wiki without the extensive features of the growing groupware solutions such as tikiwiki which are amazing feats of engineering, but only serve to complicate something that is supposed to be easy.

wikkawiki produces excellent documentation, fast.  Setup accounts for your editors then disable login and you remain in control of who gets to edit.

Styling the wiki can be done through CSS plus a header.php and footer.php file. Click here for an example of one with a modified design.

It includes Geshi by default (for colourised code snippets) and you can wirte PHP directly into a page and it will be evaluated at read time.

see http://wikkawiki.org/HomePage for more details.

 Older Entries