Monthly Archives: June 2010

Using Twitter

I’ve started using Twitter very recently, and although it probably seems like the sort of thing I would have been all over years ago, I actually didn’t see what I would do with it. But now I do. Twitterhttp://www.twitter.com/Twitter is a rich source of instant information. Stay updated. Keep others updated. It’s a whole thing. I’m a big Facebook user (Maybe too much? Maybe it doesn’t matter?), although if the truth be told, I actually signed up by accident – back in the day, Facebook didn’t make the sign-up process terribly clear. Facebook used to be more about the networking of people, and the connections between them, then about the uploading of media, and more recently about the entering of information (and through comments and ‘liking’, the expression of opinion) by status updates, and now whole information pages on subjects. The more recent moves to encourage people to update their status in Facebook, to use their status to express opinions and broadcast information in real time have been a direct response to Twitter, which is all about broadcasting snippets of information in 140 characters or less. Twitter by comparison is a ‘one trick pony’, but it’s a hell of a […]

Read More »

To steal shamelessly from the A-team: “If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can get a knife, a pistol and night-vision goggles and then roam around Pakistan looking to get revenge on a terrorist mastermind in Afghanistan”

RTÉ News: American reportedly hunting bin Laden arrestedhttp://www.rte.ie/news/2010/0615/binladen.htmlPakistan authorities have detained an American armed with a dagger, a pistol and night vision goggles for allegedly trying to sneak into Afghanistan to hunt and kill Osama bin Laden.

Personally, I think he got off very, very lightly.

Just about ready

I’ve just finished the last piece of the puzzle, so to speak, which is the Facebook-style ‘Link Excerpter’. This is the feature which I was using a lot on Facebook (and the accompanying commentary which was drawing the wrath of fellow Facebook users) which I needed to reproduce on this blog. Apparently no-one had released such a thing until now, other than one released by a company which was clearly looking to profit from passing the link through their servers and perhaps making use of the analytics information as a profit model. Interesting, but not for me. My plugin is currently pretty crude in that it checks the content for a ‘quicktag’ on save, and replaces it with mark-up based on the arguments supplied (at a minimum, a URL, but more arguments for title and content are available). After that, you can edit the output HTML, and of course you’ll need some styles for that mark-up too. andcurve.weblog » Archive » Irish Economics Made Simplehttp://www.andcurve.com/wordpress/2009/07/26/irish-economics-mad »I’m frequently (too frequently, some might say!) posting on Boards.ie, particularly these days in the Politics section, where you’ll find no end of interesting ideas on a) Ireland and the EU and b) Ireland’s economy. […]

Read More »