I ticked the wrong box

Twitter seems to be having some issues, well, more issues than normal.  I was surprised to not get any updates on Twitterrific on my iphone today, so though I’d check out what was going down on their site.  It appears that I’ve lost all of the people I was following, and all of my followers.  A quick check with some of the followers as well, and they’ve lost all their contacts.

Come on Twitter, what’s going on?

(and if you want, follow me on Twitter!)

I spent the day reworking Glimmer Design.  I always intended to – the template I had on there was good, but not quite what I was after.  I had a think last week about what I’d like the site to look like, and I made it today.

 

Homepage

 

And the page behind the spanner (yes! that’s what it’s supposed to be)

There are 2 things that concern me

 

1. People’s browser windows may not be big enough for all the content
2. The icons down the bottom of the page may be a little obtuse.

 

I’ve updated WordPress, AND migrated my two blogs together to be one, again.

I’ve also tried to support the existing feeds – so I’ve got a couple of permanent redirects in the .htaccess files to sort them out.  So, if your feeds don’t work anymore, your crappy feedreader doesn’t support the HTTP specification correctly.

I’ve been struggling to find podcasts that I really dig. Redmonk radio lost me as a listener. I thought their early episodes (up to around 40 or so) were great. A good mix of strategy, business, and IT – in a general sense. I’m quite an enterprise focussed generalist, so that really appealed to me. However, recently they have released the RIA and IT Management podcasts, and they are not for me at all – so I unsubscribed.

I went looking last night for some new podcasts in iTunes that might appeal to me. I found a couple, but am still left unimpressed.

What I found was…

• Deloitte UK Insights – Interesting analysis from Deloitte UK – based around their recent releases of sector based 2008 predictions. I liked this, but I’d like it to be more frequent than yearly
• boagworld.com – not listened yet
• Enterprise Architecture with Jan Popkin and Enterprise Architecture: Lessons Learned – thinly veiled sales podcasts from Telelogic – authors of the Popkin System Architect tool (which I personally like as a tool, but not as much as Metis Architect)
• Manager Tools – not listened yet
• Pragmatic Programmers – not listened yet
• TelcoTalk – product reviews, US based, but features some international news. I think this has promise, but needs to leave just reporting about device press releases and features, and start to comment more on how the devices are unique in the market, their competitors, business value they create etc…
• The Web 2.0 Show – not listened yet

What I’m actually looking for is IT / Telecommunications / Enterprise / business / strategy / analysis style talking. I’m not after development podcasts (although the Ruby On Rails podcast is good, and I’m expecting PragProg, boagworld and web2.0 show to be similar), but I do enjoy the style of them – talking about new ways of working, the business value of agile methods, interviews with startups and businesses on introduction of new technology into the enterprise etc.

Does anyone know of anything that will fit the bill?

I’m doing a bit of Flash work for a mate who is setting up a website to host video. One of the problems I just solved was how to get some text to flow around an image. I was hoping there would be some sort of way to make a textfield of arbitrary shape (with vectors or something) because I really wanted an L shaped textfield, so I could place an image in the upper left corner, but sadly, they are just rectangles. I found this post though, and the solution was so simple.

Just convert the textfield to Render text as HTML!  Put your normal HTML tags in, and it’s all good bro.

That’s what I like about this whole Flash thing – it’s very easy to merge the richness of Flash with the simplicity of the web.

What I don’t like is that the content isn’t searchable by Mr. Google

Well, I’ve just spent the last wee while migrating my account from http://rickerbh.blogspot.com to http://blog.hamishrickerby.com So, you’ll now be reading this on my fancy new self-hosted WordPress instance.

The migration process was relatively simple. TextDrive made it a piece of cake for the installation process, I only had a small issue with the migration of my data across. It was only yesterday that I upgraded my blogger account from the old version, to their new (no longer beta) version, and changed all my templates as well. Because of this, I couldn’t use the automatic import facility on WordPress as it doesn’t yet support the new blogger. I checked out a couple of articles on the web on how to import between the two, but the BEST thing I found to do (and this is suitable for me because I don’t really mind that I lost comments on my blog) was export all the articles as 1 large RSS feed, and them import them back into wordpress. Blogger confused me a little because the default RSS feed didn’t support all of my comments, but I found that using the following URL, I could get all the data out that I needed

http://YOUR_BLOG_HERE.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?start-index=1&max-results=999&alt=rss 

That downloads your last 999 posts, starting at the first. If you have more than that, then you write too much, and you can just play with the start-index value to get the rest.

So, as part of this change I have resolved to write more – and write more things about me, rather than just reviews on albums and movies. And to facilitate this, I’ve decided to give the ecto blogging client. We’ll see how it goes. I’ve got 20 days to try it out, so expect a few more updates from me over the next 3 weeks.

So, I’m also going to alter the graphics on this site, but that can be done a bit later. The default ones are quite nice, but I have something in mind that I’d like to see implemented.

Oh, and if you had subscribed to my last blog, you’ll need to resubscribe. This one has a nice new feed for you.