graeme.blog

Category: reviewed

  • Bundling up your Social Networking

    Okay, you’re a member of several Social Networks now. There is probably one you use a lot, likely the one you started with, but you haven’t done much with the others. What if you could post messages or updates to several of them at once? This is where ping.fm comes in. Presently supporting Facebook, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr and Twitter, and soon to add support for Myspace and Bebo, this is a simple web-based app that will allow you to post to all of these networks at once. Nice and simple to set up, and it does what it promises fine. It’s still in a private beta at the moment, but let me know if you want to try it, I have a code that may (or indeed may not) still work for signup.

    You can also bundle up what you’ve been doing at the other end too. Friendfeed will gather together feeds of your activities on several social networks, blogs, photo sites, Youtube, Last.fm and several other places, and offer them all up as a single feed (this is mine). You can also add all your friends, and follow their feeds too. I personally find that last element a little intrusive, as you can do that without asking. You can do so and choose to keep it private, but for now I won’t do either for anyone that hasn’t tracked me down and added me in Friendfeed.

    There has been a little surge of these bundling services, taking the API or feeds of several different sites, and offering them up as a whole new site. Both definitely offer something to the user, and I’m using both daily now. I do wonder though if they strip away some of the individual features of different sites to fit what all of them have. I am sure there will be several more such ideas coming in the next few months though.

  • Nokia N96 Announced

    Slightly behind on my RSS feeds, I’ve just found out that Nokia have announced the successor to the N95, the imaginatively named Nokia N96. It looks nice, they’ve recessed the controls a little, given it a darker sleeker look. Headline features are an expandable 16GB memory and a larger screen (2.8 inches over the N95s 2.6). It is a few millimetres longer, but a couple slimmer. It will use the same battery, so there are a few mutterings on the Nokia and Symbian blogs that it won’t particularly improve the battery life.

    Overall it looks like a style improvement, but no massive advantage over the N95 other than memory. Of course there could be some tweaks to the spec before release, but there isn’t going to be a touchscreen or anything really exciting.

  • How I doubled the traffic on my WordPress Blog

    I’ve just checked the stats for this blog in my Google Analytics account, and lo and behold, over the past month the number of visitors to graemehunter.co.uk has doubled! This is the biggest jump I’ve ever seen, and it isn’t a one day leap either, a nice steady progression upwards.

    I think the main reason has to be the redesign of the blog I did a month ago. The simple tactic was to keep my current Links posts on the front page, by using a WordPress theme that used asides (where a particular category is listed in a separate column in a smaller font). More links on a page, and also it looks more interesting. I have main content in the main column of the blog, then those links (which are posted automatically from my del.icio.us account each night, a summary of everything I’ve bookmarked for the day). Very satisfying to see such a result for a few changes.

  • Spicebird 0.4 available for download

    Spicebird is an open-source collaboration suite. Simply put, it is built on Mozilla’s Thunderbird code, and also includes calendars, instant messaging, notes, contacts, feed reading and an old-school news reader. It look nice, is well put-together thus far, has a lot of integration with Google applications such as gmail and calendar, and is shaping up nicely. It isn’t there yet, you can only use Jabber (including Google Talk) with it thus far, you can only import Google Calendars thus far, but I’m in the market for something that I can stealthily replace Lotus Notes with on Linux, and this has some potential.

    I’ve tested Spicebird out quickly, it works on 64 bit Kubuntu without much complaint, it seems fairly intuitive, and definitely has a lot of potential. If I could have all my IM accounts in there (so MSN, AOL, Yahoo, ICQ, IRC as well as what it does at the moment) I’d be interested. If it could do social networking like Flock does, I’d be very interested. If they could build Firefox into it, so all my desktop tabs mixed with my web tabs, I’d be incredibly interested. All these all possible, I just wish I could sit down for the next few weeks and write them myself (if only).

    EDIT 2014 update: Spicebird is no more, but some of its ideas are availbable as plugins for Thunderbird, and Mozilla even now offers its own IM client, Instantbird.

  • Firefox tries to save install.php to disk when installing WordPress 2

    I’ve hit this issue before with another php-based product, but suffered it again yesterday when trying to install WordPress 2.2. What happens is that you set up the wp-config.php file correctly, upload all the files to your webserver, go to the location of the new blog in Firefox, and click on the link to run the install of WordPress. It tries to save install.php to disk, instead of running the install. If you are using Internet Explorer, you get page not found.

    Now I really hit a brick wall with this, it took me quite a while to track down the solution. The mistake I made along the way was thinking it might be down to having an old version of PHP4 on my server. I tried installing WordPress 1.5, and that worked fine. The fact it did, and upon further examination both my MySQL and PHP installs were suitable for WordPress 2.0, meant I really couldn’t understand the problem.

    I did some further searching for answers, and got a good lead when I looked at my Apache error logs. I found the following:

    PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted

    A quick search on how to solve this issue with Firefox this found me the following page that helped me solve it: Tech-Recipes.com I just had to alter the following line in my php.ini file to increase the available memory:

    memory_limit = 8M

    I upped it from 8 to 16 (it’s on a test server, the suggestion was to try 12). Basically up it slowly and try again until you stop getting the error. This worked, and I could install WordPress 2.2 fine from there.

    General pointers:

    • If you haven’t got shell access to your hosting, or the error logs/php install, you will need them to look at the php setup for you
    • It’s also worth making sure you have the correct permissions and ownerships on the files first
    • Apache was set up and running correctly in my case

     

  • The Google Reader keyboard shortcut I like the most

    If you’ve been using Google Reader for a while, you probably know about using J and K to go forwards and back through stories. Well this is what I use, along with the list view, to read a lot of stories at speed. I audition them for my attention, if they don’t grab it, I’m onto the next. There is one more shortcut though, that I like for this purpose. The humble U.

    U removes the list of folders and feeds on the left-hand side of the reader, giving all of the screen space over to the actual stories themselves. I normally tend to view all, rather than view folders individually, so it lets me see more of the stories in one go to make my value judgement without having to scroll. To get the list of folders and feeds back, just tap U again.

  • Terminal Window in Netbeans 7

    I’ve just started using the beta of the Netbeans 7 IDE. There are a few sharp new little features in there. The HTML5 support is much needed, but a nice one I’ve just found is the ability to launch a Terminal window (in Linux and on OSX). Just go to Window > Output > Terminal.

  • Finding film times very quickly on Google

    Today I read a very helpful article, exploring Google’s hidden features. I particularly liked the shortcut to look up film times very quickly. However it doesn’t describe quite how to do it for the UK. So, to find your local cinema times for a film, type in “movies borat ox1”, replacing borat with the name of the film you want, and ox1 with whatever the first part of your postcode is. The first results will be the local cinemas and the times it is showing. If you are signed into Google, it will also offer to remember the postcode for you, so that in future you can just type “movies borat”.

  • Welcome to graemehunter.co.uk

    So, this is my new site. Basically the plan is that here I will blog about technical issues here, including my career as a software developer, talk about things I am working on at work and for myself, talk about testing out various technologies and platforms, and generally have a more appropriate home for such issues than my personal blog. I’m also going to have my CV on here at some stage, so it will serve as a starting point to learn more about me and what I do. I have a few things to put up on here that I have developed in the past as well, mainly a few search plugins for Firefox that I wish to give a home to.

  • Dean’s FCK editor for WordPress plugin

    I’ve just started using Dean’s FCK WordPress plugin on this blog. I really am not a fan of the standard WYSIWYG WordPress editor, it is really flakey, and not very intuitive. The FCK editor is a bit more comprehensive, and as it happens, I am also more used to it, as it is in the Infoglue CMS which we use at work.

    Thus far, looks a lot better, and editing HTML is a lot nicer as well. Will report later after I’ve used it for a while, but so far very happy with it.