Category Archives: Internet

iPhone + Skype?

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O2 (in the UK) can’t be very happy?  I can now call any other skype user from my iPhone for free as long as I have a wireless connection somewhere.  It’s not as easy to receive calls, you need to be logged into Skype on the phone and you can’t run 3rd party apps in the background, but if you know someone’s calling you via Skype you can be ready for it.  And making outgoing calls for free to other Skype users is the real cost saving I guess.

Sound quality seemed pretty good as well.

I bet the Skype charges for calling real phones are cheaper than the O2 network charges as well, I may look into that.

On the virtual move

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I’m tired of Gradwell’s slow performance, sloppy change management, undelivered promises and apparent change of direction.  The final straw oddly though, was an unsolicited sales call, only days after total failures of their infrastructure.  I may have stuck around longer if not for that call.  In an attempt to not store my eggs in the same basket, I’m moving domain registrations to gandi.net and hosting to a virtual private server with 1and1.  I’m sure their support is no better than Gradwell, and the net result is that it actually costs me a little bit more per month, but I get full control over the server where my sites are hosted, can host as many sites as I like and don’t have to put up with being told ‘things are fixed’ when they’re clearly not.

So far, www.bookthing.co.uk, www.onelinemoviereviews.co.uk and www.gemmellmania.co.uk have moved across.  The .com’s are a little more annoying, for various reasons so they’ll be going more slowly.  I’ll be moving darkstorm last because there’s a lot of mail forwarding happening on that domain and I don’t want to mess it up.

I’m really happy generally with gandi.net and 1and1 are ‘ok’.

WordPress Plugins

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Wrote my first WordPress plugin today (for www.bookthing.co.uk), it’s a pretty simple plugin architecture especially if you’re not trying to do anything too clever.  I just wanted a shortcode (some text you put into a post which is expanded by a plugin) to read some values from some custom fields and include them in the article footer.  It saves having to paste lots of formatting HTML into each post and lets you just suck content from the custom fields.

I was surprised I couldn’t find a simple ‘template’ style plugin on the WordPress site, maybe I was just using the wrong search terms.  It’s the kind of thing that would be very useful for building common information boxes for reviews, etc.  Anyway, I hacked together a 59 line php file, of which around 1/3rd is info and license to read two custom fields and whack them into a div.

Took about 9000% less time than I expected.

Twitter Updates for 2009-02-24

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  • bed! #
  • bacon cob and diet red bull, the breakfast of diabetic champions #
  • the worst thing about being involved in a fantastic project and a terrible project, is the horrible one feels even worse by comparison #
  • no gmail for nearly 2 hours now, how will i survive? where have you gone gmail!? where! #
  • yay, gmail is back! #
  • monsters vs aliens looks like it might be the best animated movie of 2009 #
  • just found the perfect wordpress plugin – AZIndex – http://azindex.englishmike.net/azindex #

Twitter Updates for 2009-02-24

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  • So, another go at using twitter (second or third major attempt) – what do people use to follow twitter? any recommendations? #
  • Two meetings down, one more to go at 3pm – only 4.2 days until the weekend #
  • grrrr, can’t find the section i’m looking for in a manual, i know it exists, i’ve read it, but can’t find the fsking right manual #
  • now that i’ve remembered how to read, installation of myphpadmin is going much better … #
  • er, phpmyadmin, i have a serious mental block about that name format #
  • ooh, twhirl is very – blue – #
  • very very tired – 5am start with the cats sucks #
  • almost totally over my working day now – so a couple of hours before i go to bed and start again #

Twitter-too

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I’m trying Twitter again (you can find me over here), mainly because more of my friends have started using Facebook again and I can update my Facebook status via Twitter, so I may as well use Twitter.  You’ll see updates on the right side bar, and a daily summary of my tweets as a blog post (unless I get pissed off with that feature).

It’s never too early to decide you’re going to be famous and need a Twitter-Policy, so here’s mine, in advance of me being famous and having 300,000 followers.

  1. If you follow me, I may not necessarily follow you back.  Don’t be sad, you’re not alone.
  2. I promise never to write a blog post saying I’ve twittered something or tweet saying I wrote a blog post.  I understand the two audiences are not the same and you can choose which of my streams of pointless conciousness to decide to read and which you don’t, I won’t hate you.
  3. The exception to #2 is that until I get bored, I’ll use the automated feature to collect all my tweets into a daily post.
  4. #3 is because I also promise to stop blogging one line thoughts which should have been tweets, but I still want everything collected in one place at the end of the day.
  5. #4 is really because at the core I’m a narcissistic control freak.