How to Restore Twitter to Something Useful

January 16, 2023 | Comment

Since the takover of Twitter by Elon Musk changes have been coming thick and fast. Some, such as Twitter Blue, have been well reported and endlessly debated. Others, such as the change to the timeline, less so. It is the latter that I am going to concentrate on today.

Twitter has long tried to encourage behaviour that it wants rather than what the consumer might want. This means pushing tweets from people that you might not follow but others you follow do, in the hope that you will build your own followers. The problem with this is that you end … Read the rest

Mastodon and verifying websites

November 24, 2022 | Comment

Mastodon is all the rage at the moment as Twitter is driven into the ground in full public view by new overlord, Elon Musk. I’m not going to go into the pros and cons of Mastodon here but looking at one specific thing that is different to Twitter – the automatic validation of websites.

Getting your verification link

In the profile section Mastodon allows you to record up to four pieces of metadata. This can be anything you want, such as location or pronouns, and you can also record your website addess here too. You can put any link … Read the rest

Accessing Local Resources over the Internet with Packetriot

November 1, 2019 | Comment

When I am doing any development, such as for PostRecycler, I do the coding on my laptop running Apache, PHP and MySQL locally via MAMP. This is fine until I need to share work with others which means I have to either upload the work onto a public server or do it via screen sharing. Neither are particularly ideal.

I was vaguely aware of the service ngrok which allows you to expose your local services on the web and then, via Reddit, saw the similar service Packetriot which does a similar thing so I thought I would give … Read the rest

How to store UNICODE in a non-UNICODE database

August 9, 2019 | Comment

For a side project I am working on (Glad you asked! PostRecycler which makes the most of your social posts) I needed to all entry of unicode characters for just one field.

This left me in a bit of a quandary as I really didn’t want to have to convert the whole of my database to UTF-8 just so I could have this one column accept unicode characters.

Then I remembered something I had discovered in our companies web app which accepted unicode characters but I knew the database wasn’t unicode enabled. However, I knew that this column was encrypted … Read the rest

Here’s a Question that Pains me… Is Evernote Dying?

July 26, 2018 | Comment

It really pains me to say this but I am worried about the longevity of Evernote, a tool that I have been using for many, many years. So long in fact that I now have well over 30,000 notes stored in it.

Evernote co-founder Phil Libin always said that his aim was to create a “100-year startup” meaning that it’s “a company that’s around in 100 years, which means Evernote’s product needs to be durable.” Right now I cannot see them achieving that aim. Of course that aim could have been ditched when Libin left in 2016.

Why have … Read the rest

Custom HTML Widget Changes in WordPress

April 17, 2018 | Comment

Last week I was asked by a client if I could help them put the Mailchimp newsletter signup form on their site. They had been trying for a while and they couldn’t get the form to appear at all. “No problem” I said, think that this would be a doddle. A couple of hours later I was pulling my hair out as I tried everything I could to get it to work.

Finally I did the inevitable Google search and discovered the at some point recently the custom HTML widget had been changed and that “some HTML tags like script, … Read the rest

Font Awesome and Glyphicons not Working on iOS Safari

May 31, 2016 | 5 comments

I have been working on a new side project (called WriteTrack since you ask!) which is based on the bootstrap framework and makes use of both Font Awesome and Glyphicons. I had got far enough along the path to want to check out the look on a mobile device which is when I came across the issue that you can see on the left hand side of the header image above. They weren’t rendering as expected at all – the desired look is what you can see on the right hand side of the header image above.

A search of … Read the rest

Now that Microsoft is Shutting Sunrise

January 5, 2016 | 2 comments

I have been a big fan of Sunrise but there was always a danger when it was taken over by Microsoft that they would eventually shut it down and that is now on the cards. I really like the way that Sunrise allows me to see in my calendar information other than my diary entries such as Tripit travel plans and Foursquare checkins and I didn’t want to lose that.

My initial thought was to do something through IFTTT but not all services were covered and I couldn’t get the options I wanted to change the entry colour, for … Read the rest

WordPress, Cloudflare, Caching & Version Numbers

December 23, 2015 | Comment

While I love WordPress one thing that really bugs me is its insistence on adding the version number to the end of resources, so you end up with links links this:

http://www.spokenlikeageek.com/wp-content/themes/required/style.css?ver=4.4

The version number is added to enable browser caching of files thereby speeding up page loads. The issue with this is if you make a change to the resource it is difficult to get the changes showing without clearing your cache. Additionally, as I am using CloudFlare this step by WordPress is superfluous.

All is not lost however, you can remove these version number by adding the … Read the rest

Twitter Cards Validation Error

January 26, 2015 | Comment

Twitter have had a neat feature for a while now that allows for additional information to be included with a tweet that is then displayed when you expand the tweet. This is how it looks:

And on a mobile client:

To enable these you need to set-up some meta data on your website (there is a good guide here) and then validate this information with Twitter here. When I did so I was greeted by the following message:

ERROR: FetchError:exceeded 4.seconds to Portal.Pink-constructor-safecore while waiting for a response for the request, including retries (if applicable) (Card error)

This … Read the rest