Month: November 2010

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As I wonderd if schools were open this morning I checked the North Lanarkshire Council : Winter schools daily update webpage which was down so turned to nlcwinter (nlcwinter) on Twitter there were no new updates at that time so I tweeted:

johnjohnston
john johnston

@nlcwinter http://www.northlanarkshire.gov.uk/winter is down?
Tue Nov 30 07:14:02 +0000 2010 from web captured: Tue, 30 Nov 10 01:59:51 -0600

Very quickly I got this mention:

isdown
isdown

RT @johnjohnston: @nlcwinter http://www.northlanarkshire.gov.uk/winter is down? http://bit.ly/gyzVwx
Tue Nov 30 07:17:20 +0000 2010 from twitterfeed captured: Tue, 30 Nov 10 08:00:43 +0000

Intregued I went to isdown (isdown) on Twitter where the profile weblink lead to this tweet:

GuyKawasaki
Guy Kawasaki

Learning from first hand experience this is an interesting search on Twitter: http://tinyurl.com/57fzra
Sat Nov 22 18:24:21 +0000 2008 from TweetDeck captured: Tue, 30 Nov 10 08:01:21 +0000

I am guessing someone is using something like twitterfeed.com : feed your blog to twitter to auto tweet the rss for the twitter search (probably using advanced to skip too much recusion by getting @isdown’s tweets?)

I’ve used twitterfeed.com to post my blog posts to twitter and for @scotedublogs to tweet all the new ScotEdublogs posts but this takes it a bit further, I guess they use the syntax for not including tweets from @isdown itself.

Anyway an interesting way of using twitter that has me thinking a wee bit. I’ve not tried any simpe twitter stuff since the OAuth authentication came in, might be time to have a wee look at it.

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Consolerium games guru Charile Love has come up with a pile of interesting stuff linked to his work and glow. A while back he published a guide to Creating Your Custom Glow Theme which has been very useful for me. Recently he has produce a url shortner for glow Glo.li with a web interface, glow webpart: Making Glow Better with glo.li and wordpress pluging and the Internet Explorer and Firefox Toolbar Alphas (with integrated Glow Search) now in beta all very much worth checking out if you use glow.

URL shortners are not necessarly a good thing I don’t think they have much place on blog posts or web pages. There a a couple of places they are handy, twitter with its 140 char limitation and printed material. Newspapers often use them and I’ve found thenm useful for printend notes. I also imagine they are worth using with children in glow. A typical glow url, say:

https://portal.glowscotland.org.uk/establishments/nationalsite/International%20Children’s%20Games/ICG%20Activities/Lists/Pages/D4.aspx

is not an easy one to put on the board for kids to type;-) http://glo.li/9hzYzG is a lot simpler.

Charlie’s Toolbar has glo.li built in making it really easy to grab a shortened url from any page in fireFox and Internet Explorer. Unfortunatly for me I am pretty welded to the Safari browser so can’t install the toolbar (I guess someone could make an extension for glo.li) but I did already use applescript with tinyurl for shortening links. I am not sure how many other glow users use applescript too but here is how it works:

Gloli

I commented on Charlie’s blog post asking about acces to gloli via the command line and he kindly explained it to me. I wrapped this up into an appleScript which I assign a keyboard shortcut via FastScripts (I’ve blogged about FastScripts before). Now I just press command-alt-control-g to get the url for the current page displated in Safari onto my clipboard ready to paste. I’ve posted the script and how to do this here: glo.li url shortner applescript just incase anyone is interested. The script does include the easiest/lasziest way to strip html I’ve manged to figure out.

If you are a glow user I suggest that you check out Charlie’s blog straight away.