Category Archives: Tech

Don’t read this unless you use Twitter and WordPress

WordPress bloggers who use Twitter have known for some time that you
can use the plugin Twitter Tools to reproduce your twitter content into your blog in one daily mindump at a time of your choosing.

You can also use Twitter Tools to point twitter readers at your blog whenever you write a new post – which has been controversial for some. My view is that it’s probably OTT for those who still blog multiple times a day, but ideal for the many of us who used to, but who now twitter many times a day instead and blog only infrequently. The practice was annoying back in the day when tweets arrived as SMSes and you couldn’t do much about it from your phone, but now that Twitter have removed this function far more people are reading Twitter from a computer.

But the aha! moment I had last week which prompted me to write this piece was an interesting bit of additional functionality you can get from adding in the plugin KB Linker to the mix. KB Linker scans your blog post texts for key phrases and inserts a link.

It’s fully configurable, so you choose your key phrases and the links they generate. At LDV, we have a full list of all Lib Dem MPs and other representatives, so that whenever one of our correspondents idly tosses in a name, the site automatically plugs their website.

Using KB Linker and Twitter Tools means you can have a system where key words in tweets can become links by the time they make it into postings on your blog – without having to use awkward tinyurls and so on.

You could use this to direct blog readers to useful posts or pages on your own site which unpack some of your shorthand. For example, councillor bloggers could point the word “ctte” to a posting explaining which committees they serve on and what they actually do.

You could use it for SEO, and point regularly occurring twitter words at sites that need a little Google boost.

You could even use it to link a hashtag to the hashtag-summary page on Twemes. And hope that the world doesn’t explode in a massive mess of Web 2.0 self-referential geekery that vanishingly few people will actually understand.

Very silly question

Halfway through a Yougov survey, we get:

Who would you say was the greatest questioner of all time?

  • Einstein
  • Holly Willoughby
  • Nostradamus
  • Aristotle
  • Jonathan Ross
  • My mum
  • Frank Skinner
  • Isaac Newton
  • Davina McCall
  • Satre
  • Anne Robinson
  • Jeremy Paxman
  • Chris Tarrant
  • Other
  • Don’t know
Well, that’s a list and-a-half.

Influential Lib Dems – and, yes, hashtag taxonomy

I had to wait until today, with the final announcement of the top ten Lib Dems, when it was finally clear I had fallen short of Iain Dale’s top-50 influential Lib Dems – despite having variously worked with or for several of those who are in the list.

And yet my reach and my influence is significant. Last Friday, I coined a phrase “hashtag taxonomy” that was resoundly mocked in all sorts of places throughout conference until finally culminating in a name check on Radio 5Live when my new friend and celebrity talking head Helen Duffett managed to crowbar it into a interview on the leader’s speech. And not only did Helen say it, someone actually heard it and twittered about it.

And now I hear the concept will be written up into a paper for an American political science journal by my colleague Dr Mark Pack, so I set to work to think of further poncey phrases that might work in an academic concept, finally coming up with the phrase “cross-media, cross-platform hegemony.” I have thought a little further on that and think now I may have confused my hegemonies with my synergies, so what we really need is cross-media, cross-platform synergy. I have been clear throughout, however, that it is most useful to refer to taxonomy in the singular. Taxonomies threatens getting singularly postmodern.

But I fear all our hashtags and taxonomies and synergies are obscuring how useful this thing that Dr Pack stumbled on last week could actually be. Basically, @partyConference (and I don’t know who they are) suggested a standard style of tag, starting with the # character, for all the party conferences. If you tag a text message with the hashtag, or tweme, ‘#libdem08’ it will automatically appear this page on the website twemes.com

To the best of my knowledge, no-one did anything to create that page – unless it was put there by @partyconference themselves. Or did the website just notice that lots of people were suddenly saying #libdem08 and bring a lot of them together in one place? (Interestingly, at the moment, there doesn’t appear to be a #lab08 page – if you try twemes.com/lab08 all you see is a message tagged #boring…)

But hold on a second minute. It’s not just the twitter messages that can be made to appear on that wee page. Items posted to del.icio.us do as well, as do photos on flickr. This is when we get to the cross-media, cross-platform excitement. Suddenly it’s all very interesting indeed.

You can really see the application of this when a large volume of tech savvy people all go to the same place at the same time. And Lib Dem conference was that place. All I need to do now is convince a few more people apart from me and Will Howells to upload photos, and we will be literally unstoppable.

I can’t wait to see whether the Tories or Labour make owt out of hashtags at their own efforts.

My first morning in the New World

So, I awoke this morning, just, turned on my phone… and no more happy chirps from all my online friends telling me how their day was going. I missed the Beaver of Bad News; I missed news from thoroughlygood about his appointment with his doctor, and a few other bits of information that are not earth-shattering but for the last year or so have been part of my daily routine.

And I got online here and eventually found and approved the comments left on the previous post, too.

Rather than answer them in the comments, I thought I would start a new post. I did, of course, realise I was getting something for nothing, and practically every time I have tried to recruit a new person to the twitterverse almost the first question has been, “How does that work, financially? How are Twitter making ends meet?” So I entirely understand that this day has been long coming, and shouldn’t be all that much of a surprise. It makes a little more sense than when Orange killed Wildfire. It is still a wrench, however.

Then there were suggestions of workarounds. I have started using Cellity (although I don’t yet like it much) because I’m the sort of person who does have a smart phone and can install apps, and does have a 3G connection. There are people on my contact list who don’t have that option, and will be impossible to convince of the merits of upgrading to a wazzocky new phone just because of the changing status of Twitter.

There was a slightly weird comment along the lines of “You want it, you pay for it” which isn’t an option – there isn’t a button to say “I’ll pay for these text messages” and the email from Twitter just said their calculations came up with a nice round $1000 per user per year on 250 messages a week. Doing the maths makes that more than I currently pay Orange for all my mobile services (apart from SMS whilst abroad, which cost me dear this year and the occasional Dropped-My-Phone-And-Broke-It tax). I’m not at all averse to paying for good internet services I use regularly – I support all sorts of things from Goosync to Wikipedia – but £50 a month seems a bit steep.

Another slightly hostile comment along the lines of “you’ll just have to have more mobile phone masts in your ward.” Erm, what?! I have used my phone extensively in my ward, including 3G services, and I’m not aware of any black spots. We’re a city, we were probably ahead of the curve when it came to mobile phone masts.

And the suggestions about continuing with a mobile phone service at our conference next month. Well, yes, it is technically possible, but it’s gone from a 2-step simple solution

  1. text “Follow libdemvoice” to +44 7624 804 423, which you can do from anywhere in the world without us needing to know your number
  2. receive a message every time one of the team taps text into the internet

… to something a whole lot more complicated

  1. We would now have to actively collect mobile phone numbers and be sure they had consented to receiving messages (itself no mean feat).
  2. We’d have to process opt-ins and opt-outs ourself.
  3. We’d have to choose and learn how to use an SMS bulk mailer.
  4. We have to charge it up and pay for it,
  5. and if our service was succesful we might have to find some light touch way of passing the charges onto our users.

It would have been possible, but Twitter made it all easier. Now that’s all gone, gone. (fx rents clothes asunder)

As for the relative finances of the Lib Dems vs Twitter, who knows? The Lib Dems certainly don’t have Twitter’s reach. And Lib Dem Voice, who would have been offering the service, certainly have next to nothing in their account at the moment.

And another thing!

It’s just occurred to me that I lose some of the really helpful synergy between Twitter and IwantSandy (another free service I have come to rely on), who I had set up to send text messages to my phone to remind me of stuff. I need reminding to check my voicemail, to take the bin out on a Thursday, and which bin it is this week. I’m lost, I’m lost, wail, wail.

PS I hope GMail isn’t next.

Oh my god, they killed Twitter!

An email arrives essentially telling me that the folks behind Twitter have finally realised they can’t afford to continue sending millions of text messages out for free. Although they have come to some arrangements with mobile phone carriers in other countries, the UK number has been removed from service with immediate effect. You can still send messages to it, but it will no longer send any messages back to you.

This pretty effectively kills Twitter the way I’ve been using it for the past few… years? Months? I imagine the thing I’ve been doing on this blog will continue, but it will be much harder to use it to communicate instantly. One of the good points has been the fairly instant replies you get to questions and jokes from the random set of people who follow you and you follow.

You can still get at the twitter data using either a mobile phone web browser or a third party app like Cellity, but that does take away the simplicity. I don’t suppose my mother’s mobile phone could do either, for starters. And for me, there will no longer be that constant stream of updates – I regularly get through my allowance of 250 messages a week. Life will be much quieter without the constant phone chirp.

And it rather detracts from our plans to have an instant messaging service at Lib Dem Conference too. That’s a shame – it would have been pretty cool.

EDIT: the rant continues here.

My pointless battle with the Council

The Council has upgraded its email system.  Before it was using IMAP with Horde, and there were complaints.  The system was slow, people used up their mailbox quota in the blink of an eye, it wasn’t very user friendly.  If you were one of the favoured few allowed access to your email from home, you had to use a big RSA SecurID keyfob with an ever-changing 6 digit number on the front.  I’m not entirely sure what was in council email that could possibly need as much protection as internet banking!

Now that has changed, and they’re embarking on a rollout of Outlook Web Access, which I think is the same thing as MS Exchange.

And it’s pretty good.  Access from home is much better.  It has many new features, lots of which are ace.  It should help the officers and councillors be more productive, as it is simply easier to use, despite being more fully functional.  It’s more the sort of product other organisations use, so people joining us and leaving us will have useful transferable skills.

And like other Outlook versions, it also has a good group diary facility, meaning we can store our commitments and availability on the system, and it can help organise meetings by checking other people’s schedules for you.  This could really be helpful right across the council, where there is no shortage of busy people, and particularly helpful with councillors who have strange commitment patterns.

So, I was hoping it would integrate with the electronic diary I am already using on my Nokia E65, which for the past few years has been reasonably successful at managing my diverse commitments and making sure I turn up at most of the things I am supposed to do.

I was really hoping I could just make the Council system a third or fourth place where I can sync my data to.  If I did that reasonably frequently, the version of my diary on the Council system should be up-to-date enough to be useful, and could work as an extra backup just in case.  True it would mean sending details of my personal commitments too, but you can mark them as private, and it is useful to the Council because it explains when I am on other business and not available.

Technically, I think this is possible. There is a free download which connects Nokia business phones with the Outlook system.  Unfortunately, there is a policy in place which says this is a bad idea.  They don’t want personal devices connecting directly to the council system.

This is a little odd.  I am allowed to read my email and connect to my diary from any computer in the world.  That’s at least partly the point of the new system – easy, secure, remote access.  I can even use the web browser on my mobile phone to access the system, although the screen is a bit small for that to be really useful.  But it seems actually synching with the system is different, and not allowed.

The solutions suggested have been helpful, but stop short of what I want.  “Keep two diaries!” they suggest.  Which strikes me as a recipe for real confusion, not least because being a councillor is more a lifestyle than a job.  Council commitments can be any time from 7am-10pm six nights a week.

They have also offered me a Council mobile phone with data connection that would do everything my existing phone does.  On a one off basis, they don’t mind taking my existing data from my existing phone, putting it on the council system and from then on, only using a Council phone.

Now, there’s problems with this approach.  Nottingham City Councillors are offered a fair amount of kit if they want it to help with the job of being a councillor.  You can have a council telephone extension in your home, which I do have.  They offer mobile phones, a laptop or a computer.  I’ve resisted all of those because I already have one of each, and I don’t want another.  I don’t want two computers on my desk where one can only be used for council work and one for private, not least because the boundary between the two can be blurry.  This weekend, a Council director kindly came to a Lib Dem meeting to brief Lib Dem local party members about regeneration in Nottingham. Was that encouraged Council work or verboten party political work – or really a blend of the two?

So I have resisted taking on Council tech, because in almost all circumstances, I can use my own equipment to do the same job, and not have to worry about whether I am abusing council facilities when I also use it to do all the things I normally do with the internet, which if I’m honest consumes almost all of my leisure time.

The point at which this approach doesn’t work is when the Council ban personal machines from connecting to their network.  Which is an understandable position – their own machines they are responsible for keeping secure, virus free, and legal in terms of software licences. Other people’s machines are a different kettle of fish – close to Rumsfeld Unknown Unknowns.

But where that leaves me with my diary is uncertain. Hopefully this will be resolvable.

Using IwantSandy to remember birthdays

Right. I should send birthday cards to my friends and family but far too often, I forget. I have come up with many different strategies to try and remember. The birthdays are all in my electronic calendar, but that’s generally no good, because I don’t see them until the day itself rolls round.

So I’m trying desperate measures with IwantSandy to try and remind me. This is very much a belt and braces approach – lots and lots of reminders.

First of all, prepare a list of all the birthdays in the year. In my case, I e-mailed my super-organised mother, and she responded with all the family ones. Then I could go through my own calendar and add in my friends that she doesn’t know about.

Then I can send Sandy one humoungous email with all birthdays at once…

(NB if you’re American, you’ve probably told Sandy that Christmas is 12/25, so you will have to switch the numbers round)

remember @birthday @yearly +

* Nick Clegg 7/1
* Boss 15/1
* Mother-in-law 26/1 @family
* Best friend 15/2
* Dad 27/2 @family

… and so on all the way through the year

Then because I need a reminder before the day itself to give me a chance to buy, write and post a birthday card with any hope of it arriving in time, I have also set up an “early warning” list. It’s essentially the same list but with 4 deducted from each date

remember @birthday @yearly @earlywarning @twitter +

* Nick Clegg 3/1
* Boss 11/1
* Mother-in-law 23/1
* Best friend 11/2
* Dad 23/2

… and so on all the way through the year

Now, Sandy will email me and text me a reminder four days out for each of the birthdays.

But for a really belt and braces approach, I have also asked her to let me know on the first day of each month who’s birthday is coming up later that month

Remember January birthdays @monthlybirthdays @yearly 1st Jan

* Nick Clegg 3rd
* Boss 11th
* Mother-in-law 23rd
* Best friend early Feb

… and so on for each month.

This means that on the first day of each month, Sandy will email me with a list of everyone due to have a birthday in the next four weeks. Who knows, I might even remember to buy a whole stack of cards in advance, write them, and put them in the appropriate filing doodah in my 43 folders in my filing cabinet (43 folders still very much on @todo)

So far, each of these steps will work very well. But what do we do when appraised of a new birthday that wasn’t already in the calendar? Simple! One quick email to Sandy can update everything you need

Remember Friend’s baby (2008) 6/3 @birthday @yearly
Remember Friend’s baby (2008) 2/3 @birthday @yearly @earlywarning @twitter

Lookup March birthdays

When Sandy responds, she should tell you she’s scheduled both reminders, and give you a list of your March birthdays. To this email, you can then say

Update #3 * Friend’s baby (2008) 6th

Update #3 +* Friend’s baby (2008) 6th

NB – putting year of birth with someone’s entry can help you remember significant birthdays in the future. If they’ve only just been born, then pretty much every birthday is going to be significant for the next 21 years!

The one significant disadvantage of doing it this way is that you can get loads of rogue responses to your searches. If I now search Sandy for “Nick Clegg” he will come up on every birthday in the year because a copy of the initial email had his name along with everyone elses.

New design

The tuit fairy (1) has arrived and I have wasted spent a few hours redesigning the layout of the blog and updating all the plugins, so that I am now bang up to date across the board. Wonder how long that will last.

In the process, I seem to have killed the blogroll. This may not be a bad thing – many of the entries were to colleagues who have shuffled off this mortal blogosphere.

But there are some 114 115 blogs I read regularly according to my Google Reader OPML and it would be nice to reflect this in the gaping void in column three over there –>

Apart from anything else, it’s part of the community of bloggers to have links to the people you read.

Nothing I have tried has quite worked. I don’t want to enter the full 115 into the WordPress links manager. Various weird things have happened when I have tried to use Google Reader’s “clip” function, including disabling my entire website, apparently for me only. Dataflame’s live customer service people managed to fix it, but I am not entirely sure what went wrong.

Bah. Any good OPML widgets out there?

I have also finally succumbed to the near ubiquitous Lib Dem Buttons. Not least since I was asked to design one recently!

(1) tuit fairy, brings the round tuit. As I will do that when I get a round tuit.  Pronounced too-it not tweet. Got there yet?

Une tache peut en cacher une autre

In France, the sign un train peut en cacher un autre is the equivalent of the English “Another train coming if lights continue to show.” In other words, don’t get impatient if the barriers at the level crossing don’t go up straight away. I’ve used the phrase in the past to demonstrate that French can be really elegant and compact, although of course, anyone who’s ever tried to write a business letter in French will also know there are moments when it can be monumentally long-winded. Je vous prie d’agreer Monsieur, l’expression de mes sentiments les plus distingués is the French for Your sincerely. Or at least it used to be the last time I actually learned any French.

Anyway, un train peut en cacher un autre means literally One train can conceal another. What I’m aiming for in the title is one task can bring on the next, although I may also be misremembering une tache for a task.

You see, earlier this afternoon, I wanted to get the cool WordPress plugin that automatically reposts today’s twitter messages in a new post without any need for my input. So I downloaded and installed Alex King’s Twitter tools. And it promptly broke my blog completely, so I uninstalled it again, and left to go to committee.

Hours later, after a brief interlude back home, then a further trip into town for a group meeting and a briefing from the chief exec of our ALMO (the town hall has been lousy with Labour councillors turning up en masse for a contested election for council leader and deputy leader, and I have not yet heard the outcome… I’ve been a councillor for five years, and we’ve only had one leader and deputy in all that time so if it happens, a change will be interesting) I tried to find out why the plugin didn’t work, and found it was because my installation of WordPress had been superseded dozens of times since I last upgraded.

So, I downloaded the new version (it’s free, after all) and went through the necessary steps to upgrade.

Now here’s where the extra tasks come in. The new version has knackered my old template a bit, with all the links on the side now appearing multiple times. So I’ll have to rewrite the template, or find a sexy new one – which is another task which could be quite time consuming.

And the new version of WordPress helpfully points out which of your other plugins are not au courant. Apparently, it’s nearly all of the ones I use. So I will have to download and replace each of those one by one, which will take a while.

Not tonight, however, I’m supposed to be typesetting a leaflet.