So, I’ve just updated my Wordpress plugin to use my own homebrewed URL shortener, http://dpsh.me, when Tweeting about my new blog posts. How exciting!
It was a pretty quick little project to build the shortener a few weeks ago, and updating Wordpress to use it was really easy too. I really should post the code somewhere.
Now, if Tweetie would just hurry up and release an update to the Mac client that includes custom shorteners like the iPhone client does.
Today I was searching around for a good vCard library to use for an application I’m currently building.
I came across a library by Carlos Alcala in the CodeIgniter Wiki. I wasn’t completely satisfied with the library as it was written, so I took the liberty of rewriting it to meet my own personal taste.
You can take it or leave it, but I’m quite happy with the result. I’m not going to go over it here in detail, as the comments are fairly self-explanatory, and a sample controller file is included, demonstrating various usage of the library.
I’ve teamed up once again with the illustrious Jamie Rumbelow to make something new, fun and totally nerdy.
We’re currently working on a new podcast called The Fuel Podcast, specifically focused on the CodeIgniter community, but covering a broad array of web development topics that CodeIgniter and non-CodeIgniter developers all will be interested in.
We recorded our first episode last week, and Jamie’s currently working fervently to get our site up and running, so we can open The Fuel Podcast up to the world.
I’ll update when we’ve got something to show for our labors. It’ll certainly be an entertaining experience for all who chose to listen. Our sarcastic, slightly competitive and general nerdy humor will keep you on your toes while you hear us comment on the latest and greatest on the Web.
Well, doesn’t that sound quite weird?
If you follow my Tweets at all, you’ve probably read that in late November, I’ll be traveling to the U.K. to join the illustrious Jamie Rumbelow, prince of PHP, at his first Cambridge Geek Day conference.
You may also know, that I’ve built a basic prototype of an application called hashtag.it, which seeks to become a single source for meta information about hashtags used on Twitter.
One thing I’ve noticed at conferences is that session or conference hashtags are not standardized. Well, duh. That’s the beauty of the hashtag, it’s a completely community-driven piece of meta data. That’s all fine and good, but with the growing number of Twitter users, relevance is being lost. The goal of hashtag.it is to increase the relevance of Tweets to users by publicizing information about hashtags that users are using.
In a bit of a publicity stunt, I’ve offered to build an application for Cambridge Geek Day that helps attendees to use hashtags to make their Tweets during the conference more useful to other attendees and others interested in the event.
So, I’m building Cambridge Geek Day Connect. Basically, it’s an application that maintains a small cache of Tweets that contain specific hashtags that can be configured on the fly.
On the client side, jQuery is used to poll the caching server. As I’ve begun to build out the application, I’ve had to wonder what will happen with approximately 300 attendees fire up Connect, and requests begin to hit my server at a rapid clip. Will it crash? I hope not. At the same time, I wondered, what if a new hashtag comes into use after the event starts, and I want to make sure all the conference attendees have access to it?
The result, is a bit of a client-server setup. It’s nothing monumental, really. Configuration information is simply passed as part of each of the API’s response to the client. Configuration changes can be made to speed up or slow down the refresh of data from the client or update the hashtag filter options in the clients menu.
I’m sure it’s been done before. But I still must say, it’s pretty cool to see these configuration changes take place, being pushed out from the server to the clients.
Arrr, well, Me just wanted t’ wish you all a great International Talk Like A Pirate Day.
I hope ye all remember t’ raise your pirate flags and talk just like those seamen o’ yesteryear.
Check out http://www.talklikeapirateday.com for more information about this annual e’ent, and remember t’ post your pirate moments on Twitter with hashtag #pirateday, argh!
Translation into pirate speak provided by http://www.talklikeapirateday.com and a modified version of Dougal Campbell’s text filter suite plugin.
