mhawksey's bits and pieces

How to use bookmarklets on an Android tablet

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 23:35:58 +0100

Liam Green-Hughes has come up with a nice little app that lets him use the delicious bookmarklet on his Android tablet. If you use other bookmarkets on your android tablet but don’t want to create an app for it here is how you can do it in the browser:

1. On the page you want to use a bookmarklet on tap to get address bar

2. Open your bookmarks

3. Choose the bookmarklet you want to use (this page is populated from my desktop because I sync with my bookmarks in Chrome)

4. This should launch the dialogue box associated with your bookmarklet

Why I'll be voting SNP

Wed, 04 May 2011 21:41:00 +0100

A friend just emailed me to ask why he shouldn’t vote for SNP this is what I said:

Ah it was only 4 years ago when we had our impassioned debate about the upcoming election. There was me thinking the SNP were a shower of fools destined to plunge the country into the dark ages. Roll on 4 years and I would be quite happy if they got a second term. Meanwhile if a Labour or Liberal candidate ever made the mistake of speaking to me I would give them a piece of my mind.

My biggest complaint is they have put party politics before the view of the people they represent, us. A case in point is minimum alcohol pricing. Despite the research showing the benefits of this policy and I’d argue wide public support labour and the libs used this bill as a cheap opportunity to score points against the SNP.

In fact if I were to rank the parties AV style, and it pains me to say this, I would rank the Tories <spit> second mainly because Annabel Goldie has led a constructive opposition to the SNP. This was underlined by her speech when parliament was dissolved. Unlike Gray and Scott who used it as another opportunity to score points against Salmond, ironically highlight manifesto pledges their votes had blocked, Goldie listed their parties achievements, the things they had managed to get through as concessions to SNP policies.

So I’m afraid I’ve got no reasons for you not to vote for them ;)

My first Google Gadget to embed a flickr photoset with Galleria navigation

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 12:41:00 +0000

The xml link for this is here

Google Gadgets are really easy all you need to do is wrap some XML around html content.

Here’s more info on getting started and there is even an online editor for creating and hosting your own gadgets

If you’re interested in developing gadgets for Google Apps, the following guides will help you get started writing gadgets for the different Google Apps containers:

The code I used

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”UTF-8” ?>
<Module>
  <ModulePrefs title=”__UP_myname__” author=“mhawksey”author_email=“m.hawksey@gmail.com” author_location=“Edinburgh”directory_title=“FlickrGalleria” title_url=”__UP_mylink__”description=“Emebed a flickr photoset with Galleria navigation”>
  <Require feature=“dynamic-height”/>
  </ModulePrefs>
  <UserPref name=“myname” display_name=“Title” required=“true”default_value=“Galleria/Flickr Show” />
  <UserPref name=“mylink” display_name=“Title link” />
  <UserPref name=“photoset” display_name=“Photoset” required=“true”default_value=“72157626051720912”/>
  <UserPref name=“mywidth” display_name=“Width” default_value=“100%”/>
  <UserPref name=“myheight” display_name=“Height”default_value=“600px” />

  <Content type=“html”>
  <![CDATA[
  <script type=”text/javascript”>
  _IG_AdjustIFrameHeight();
  </script>

<style type=”text/css”>
#galleria {
  width: __UP_mywidth__;
  height: __UP_myheight__;
}
</style>
<script src=”http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js”></script>
<script src=”http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.org.uk/mashe/galleria/galleria.js”></script>
<script src=”http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.org.uk/mashe/galleria/plugins/galleria.flickr.js”></script>
<script>Galleria.loadTheme(‘http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.org.uk/mashe/galleria/themes/classic/galleria.classic.js’);</script>
<div id=”galleria”>Loading…
<script type=”text/javascript”>
  api_key = ‘4bb2dc0f5e1ef29c928d7e138c489508’
  var flickr = new Galleria.Flickr(api_key);
  flickr.getSet(‘__UP_photoset__’, function(data) {
  $(‘#galleria’).galleria({
  data_source: data,
  image_crop: false,
  show_info: true,
  autoplay: false,
  transition: ‘fade’,
  preload: 3,
  });
});
</script>
</div>
]]>
  </Content>
</Module>

Here’s some posts which have caught my attention this month: Online learning needs a...

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 16:53:20 +0000

Here’s some posts which have caught my attention this month:

Online learning needs a strategy, says new report – January 27, 2011 – Haven’t had a chance to read this myself, but right worth sharing
Focusing on BigBlueButton – January 24, 2011 – This is a very useful post to get a flavour of who is looking at the open source webinar tool BigBlueButton
ds106 Radio….lock it in!!! – January 23, 2011 – Jim Groom rocks with a post on the #ds106 radio (a mashup of dropio which lets anyone…

Bookmarklet for who can see your twitter @reply tweet

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 13:35:00 +0000

Previously in Who can see your @reply in twitter I highlighted Tony’s Common Friends or Followers on Twitter script. For this you had to download some code and create a html file to run locally. Having played with the SNAPP bookmarklet which lets you ”visualize the network of interactions resulting from discussion forum posts and replies” in various VLEs I thought it would be fun to take Tony’s code and also turn it into a bookmarklet. So now when you visit a twitter status page you can see how many people saw the @reply message in their timeline.

How to use:

Copy the bookmarklet on this page
Visit any twitter status page (here’s an example) Update: Also now works when you enter tweet via twitter home page
Click on the bookmarket saved to your browser and see the user overlap (as seen by the Google Social Graph API)

How it was made

Tweaked Tony’s code (modified version here)
Put it through this minifier
Created the bookmarket using Ben Alman’s online generator (this url populates the generator with my minified code

Who can see your @reply in twitter

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 17:18:00 +0000

I’ve been a serious twitter user for over a year now but only learned a fundamental of Twitter’s reply mechanism a couple of weeks ago (how embarrassing). Looking at the behaviour of some of the people I follow it makes me think others don’t know this little fact either.

If you were like me you probably assumed that if you @replied a person at the start of a tweet, this message would be seen by the person you were @replying (it appearing in their mentions) as well as being seen by all of your followers. Well if you thought that you’d be wrong. What actually happens is this tweet would only be seen by you, the @recipient and only the followers you have in common.

I overcame this ‘threshold concept’ having read and played with Tony Hirst’s Common Friends or Followers on Twitter. Using Tony’s tool I can tell you that if Tony (@psychemedia) mentioned me at the very start of a tweet of his 2795 followers only a 194 would see it.

So if you wanted to share a reply with all your followers how can you do it? Have you ever looked at your twitter stream and wondered why there is a typo a full stop at the start of one of your friends tweets (e.g. .@mhawksey you need to go on twitter 101)? If you have you probably, like me, didn’t realise this was how people get around this Twitter eccentricity.

One important thing to remember is this is only for tweets with @reply at the beginning of your tweet. Tweets with mentions in the body of the tweet will automatically be seen by all your followers.

Caching and displaying @rsc_ne_scotland Twitter feed

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 15:41:00 +0000

Update: Hmm, you could just use a service like Feedburner or Yahoo Pipes to handle the caching of the RSS bit.

On our JISC RSC Scotland North & East homepage we use a version 1 of the Twitter widget to display tweets (to tweak appearance we’ve actually modified the JS slightly, our local version of twitter.js here).

A problem we’ve had is the Twitter API rate limit would often kick in leaving the widget blank. A fix has been on my to do for a while and as it is the new year and all that.

Using the Build a PHP Twitter Widget post by Alex Bor I came up with the following code to cache the json and rss for our Twitter feed:

Trouble at JISCAdvanceUberTwitStream Twitter Feed

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 09:36:00 +0000

To make sure we have a steady flow of tweets on our @rsc_ne_scotland twitter feed for some time we have been pulling news and events from JISC and JISC Service websites, publishing them using the dlvr.it service.

dlvr.it has some great features for manipulating RSS feeds like adding item prefix or replacing text, but because JISC/JISC Advance Services all have their own way of publishing news and events the options provided by dlvr.it didn’t give the full control we needed so I created a Yahoo Pipe of the JISC Advance Services.

If you look at the source of this pipe at first glance it looks like it just glues a number of feeds together. Delve a bit deeper into for example the JISCTechDis2Tweet node and you’ll see a sub pipe doing some additional manipulation (Another good one to look at is the JISCNetskills2Tweet sub pipe which converts an iCal feed into RSS).

All had been going well with this mashup until the new year when our twitter feed started overdosing on JISC TechDis tweets (Thanks to @paulbrichardson for pointing out). Initially I thought it was something to do with the JISC TechDis sub Yahoo Pipe because I needed to rebuild the timestamp for this particular feed, but this appeared to be ticking along nicely.

Delving into the dlvr.it settings I noticed that I had originally set it to trickle feed updates oldest first. I’m pretty sure this was the cause of the problem. For good measures in the advance settings I also turned on ignore feed timestamps (the feed is date ordered using Yahoo Pipes anyway).

PS if you have problems getting dlvr.it to accept you Yahoo Pipe feed (HTTP 999 Error), just put it through Feedburner

Hello world

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 09:03:41 +0000

I’ve set up this site because I feel I need another place to post the bits and pieces I come across or things I do which aren’t worth putting on my main blog but still worth sharing. It all a bit of an experiment really.