Simon Hammond Blog

Facebook blogs about updating it’s status functionality. They didn’t mention everyone’s favourite new kid, twitter, but let’s look at some of those new features:

• A brand new page to see all your friends’ updates at once
• An RSS feed to put your friends’ updates in your reader of choice
• The ability to subscribe to a friend’s updates via SMS
• The ability to easily update status from your phone by sending an SMS to Facebook starting with the “@” character.

With this, Facebook essentially ensures that twitter in it’s current form remains the preserve of a community of alpha geeks. Not that they particularly grok updates, demonstrated by their late conversion to the third person and insistence on inserting that bothersome ‘is’.

Update: I ought to remember to technorati search before posting in future. Then I’d hear that facebook is gunning for twitter and facebook was twitter before there was twitter.

Tags: social software by si
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I just added a link on my newly-tended front page to my page at tumblr. Ideal for stalkers, this brings together my blogs, photos and links in a single Si-centric stream. Now you can contain me to just one feed.

In setting this up I unearthed a small bug on the ‘Si is’ feed. That should be fixed now but it made me think about why I bother with rolling my own blog. There are lots of excellent blogging platforms out there built by people with far more commitment and knowledge than I have.

I think because it’s a personal blog I want to feel like I really own it. That means knowing how it works — and it’s quirks. It also gives me a real, working test bed to try stuff out, e.g. commenting, javascript, feeds, authentication, pagination and mod_rewrite. If I want to tweak it, it’s easy to do without worrying I’m going to break something. If I do break something, it’s easy to fix and so the site organically evolves with my knowledge. It’s an open-ended fun project.

Tags: self-referential, web by si
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Someone asked me about bookmarks the other day and I described my setup: two types of bookmarks (neither of them stored with the browser).

The first are the regular ones that I’ve already used hundreds or even thousands of times. These are permanently displayed in a sidebar called Sitebar which is hosted on my site. They are automatically sorted by click frequency so that sites I use more regularly float to the top. The top of this list includes Gmail, Bloglines, Guardian, Flickr and BBC news - with Facebook coming up fast.

The other bookmarks are those I may no or may not look at a second time but I don’t want to lose and I may want to share. These are the ones that would swamp a bookmark hierarchy. I handle them with del.icio.us (although I hate typ.in.g the na.me!). If I want to find them I can and if I get around to checking out furl and decide I prefer that, I can export them. No quibble.

I’d briefly looked at a del.icio.us Firefox extension a while back but it seemed shaky, didn’t seem to put my regular links in front of me and it didn’t allow private links. So I had to run these two systems in parallel.

With the new Firefox extension, all these issues have been resolved. It’s solid and privacy has been an option for a while now. Moreover, I can get a stream of ‘last added’ links in the sidebar and my most visited sites across the top in a toolbar. This gives me the two views on my bookmarks that I want and means I can essentially forget about having to order or clear bookmarks in future. Tag and forget.

This ranks with like adblock, firebug and fireFTP as one of the killer Firefox extensions I wouldn’t do without.

Tags: self-referential, web by si
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Everybody loves the Google maps interface but until now you couldn’t draw on it.  Now you can (and then share them).

I plotted my cycle route into work and found it wasn’t as optimal as I thought.  I also found a couple of problems with the new feature that should have come out of basic testing.

1. I can’t see the length of my route.
2. The route doesn’t print.

Otherwise, this is a sweet, sweet extension that Google Maps has been crying out for.  Possibilities keep popping up in my mind to the sound of a dozen mashups becoming suddenly superfluous.

Tags: unfiled, web by si
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