Category: Web Technology

More productivity

This afternoon I did a bit more work on our home server (the one I built from bits of my old dead PC).

It’s now running:

  • A full installation of Mediawiki, with a few extensions, which Steph is using a lot right now.
  • A streamable repository of Creative Commons licensed music so that any computer in our house can stream a selection of new and interesting music. This works nicely with Rhythmbox and iTunes (I’ve not tested anything Windows based yet).
  • A local access only mailsever (built around dovecot with a squirrelmail front end), which grabs a copy of all my incoming mail and archives it locally. This means I now have an extra level of backup in case I encounter more problems with my externally hosted mail.

All of this is controlled from webmin, so my main laptop is able to configure everything without me actually having to sit in front of the server. This is good, because the server is noisy enough to consider banishing it to the spare room.

Ubiquity 0.1.5

I’ve not blogged about Ubiquity for a while. It’s a Firefox extension that I use every day to do all sorts of things (updating twitter and complex calculations mainly). The latest version is out today, and has gone a long way towards making it ready for the masses to use.

OpenID

I’ve now (finally) got two-way OpenID support built into this installation of wordpress. What this means is:

  • I can log into sites like Livejournal using my account from teknostatik.co.uk. Not that useful, but fairly impressive.
  • Anyone who has an account with Livejournal, or a Gmail account, or one of a number of other things can leave comments on this blog.

Of course, I didn’t fix this today, I’m just catching up on writing documentation and blog posts while I’m off sick with face-ache.

Introducing aaahh-records – home of free and charming music

I’ve just stumbled upon this net label, whilst trying to determine which year the Wind Whistles album was actually released in (the answer being 2007 and 2008 in different places).

The label has so far only released three albums, but two of them happen to already be on my list of favourite freely available music for this year, which makes me think I’m likely to like anything they put out.

WordPress 2.7

I wasn’t sure I needed to upgrade this website to WordPress 2.7 (the latest version of the blogging software which acts as a front-end for everything else here), but as I missed the last couple of releases I decided it might be a good idea.

The upgrade went flawlessly (following the 3 step upgrade), and I’ve also added OpenID support so that Livejournal users who read this will be able to leave me comments using username.livejournal.com as an OpenID (replacing “username” with their own username).

I don’t think anything is broken, but let me know if this is not the case.

Microblogging as a promotional tool

I’ve been thinking recently about how we (and by we I mean anyone involved in any activity they wish to promote) can get information to the largest number of appropriate people, with the least amount of effort. This interests me because I’m involved in a fair few activities which would benefit from further participation, which will only happen if people know they exist. Software projects need developers and testers, LARP games need players and musicians need people to listen to their music, or at least to know they exist.

My current area of interest is looking at the interoperability of various social networking and microblogging sites, with a view to making the right information available to the right people instantly. Twitter and Facebook are both very good at this in different ways, but there is also a lot of scope to integrate microblogging within a more traditional blogging environment such as Livejournal or WordPress, which can also reach people who might not normally ever consider signing up to Twitter.

I think having a good web presence is so important, and so vital in recruiting and retaining other like minded individuals. And now we have the tools at our disposal we should be using them, right?