I Love Open Source


Several blobby humanoids build a cube together.

As I mentioned in my last post about VoteUK, I found the TheyWorkForYou API to be a little lacking when it came to image sizing. I posted a request asking if there was a pattern to the image sizes and, if not, was it possible to have the sizes returned in the API. The "standard" […]

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Hashtag Standards


This is one of the longest and geekiest posts I've done. It's a work in progress. All comments and abuse welcome. #hashtag – As long has there has been a way to search Tweets* people have been adding information to make the easy to find. The #hashtag syntax has become the standard for attaching a […]

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Girl With A One Track Mind


It's always a thrill to hear an author read their work aloud. It's even more of an honour to be at the author's début. Last night, 100 people crammed into the function room of Canal 125 for the launch event of Girl With A One Track Mind Exposed by Abby Lee aka Zoe Margolis. Sitting […]

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Hashtags and Implicit Knowledge


What is "Implicit Knowledge"? Essentially it's stuff that everyone knows, but no one has written down. Usually it's something that people have worked out through their own experiences. This sort of knowledge is common in life - but is fatal in computing and design. Take the following tweet I received. The complaint was that #tfm&a […]

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Carnival of the Mobilists #212


Logo for Carnival of the Mobilists.

Well, we're post Mobile World Congress, so let's see what's caught the eye of the web's best mobile bloggers. Here's Carnival of the Mobilists #212! The 25 Biggest Companies in Mobile. The inimitable Tommi Ahonen pores over the statistics and shows the size of companies according to the money they make in mobile - and […]

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Don't Let Users Do Things They Can't Do


There are many "rules" when it comes to User Interface / User Experience design.  One that I try to stick to is "Don't let users do things they can't do." It's one of my gripes with Linux.  If you're editing a configuration file, you are relying on yourself to sanity check your input - often […]

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WordPress Mobile - For The Rest of Us


WordPress is only for people rich enough to buy a smartphone and cool enough to choose the right brand.  Right? From the WordPress Blog: I like to moderate comments when I’m waiting for something: a checkout clerk to help me, the dentist to call me back to the office, a soy chai to be made. […]

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Twitter For BlackBerry - Review


Blah blah Twitter.... Blah Blah BlackBerry... Blah Blah.... http://www.blackberry.com/twitter NB1: I primarily use SocialScope on my BlackBerry. SocialScope's terms of use prohibit me from showing screenshots of their beta. Hey, guys, I want to show everyone how great you are! NB2: Screenshots taken on a BlackBerry 9000 running OS 5.0 First Impressions I've never understood […]

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Twitter and Linebreaks


As any student of computer science knows, line breaks are confusing. There are styles of line breaks unique to Unix, Mac and Windows - so what should a web renderer do when faced with a newline command? In HTML, it's simple, they should be ignored. But what when it is user generated text, not HTML? […]

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VoteUK - Updates


After the tragic death of Ernest Marples, I'm sorry to say that the site fell in to a bit of disrepair. With no postcode data and no new boundary data, it looked like VoteUK was going to be permanantly out of business. Thanks - once again - to the clever-clogs at TheyWorkForYou, at least half […]

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