My site has a customised Wordpress install, a custom domain, email addresses at that domain and now a subdomain for my life steam. And other than the domain name itself, I don’t pay for anything. It’s taken me a while to work out how to get this all up and running. This post will briefly cover the services I use and the downside of going with an “almost free“ web presence.
For the core website, there’s a lot of free blog hosting options like Wordpress.com, Blogger and Posterous. I didn’t go down that route in part for historical reasons and in part for the flexibility of being able to customise Wordpress. Instead, I went with the free web hosting service Freehostia, which provides basic php and mysql support. Freehostia also gives you control of the DNS config, allowing you to buy a domain elsewhere and associate it with the site. There are other comparable free services if you hunt around.
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A while ago I switched from Tweetdeck to TwitHive for all my desktop Twitter usage. It has a lot of advantages, like being completely web-based so you can take your lists/groups with you, and you don’t have to install anything to use it. However, recently I’ve noticed more and more that TwitHive isn’t picking up all @replies, which is sort of a deal breaker. This is apparently due to a bug in the Twitter search API, but knowing that doesn’t really help me.
I’ve been using Dabr as my mobile Twitter client for a long time, and it’s awesome. Rock solid, (mildly) customisable and constantly being improved. I often wish that Dabr would put together a multi-column web-based client aimed at desktop users. In the mean time, I’ve decided to hack (and really, I mean hack) something together. So, here it is in all its glory:
<html>
<head>
<title>Twitter</title>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="300">
</head>
<body>
<iframe src="http://dabr.co.uk/" width="300" height="100%"></iframe>
<iframe src="http://dabr.co.uk/replies" width="300" height="100%"></iframe>
<iframe src="http://dabr.co.uk/lists/benrhughes/rl" width="300" height="100%"></iframe>
<iframe src="http://dabr.co.uk/lists/benrhughes/dev-tech" width="300" height="100%"></iframe>
</body>
</html>
The design and implementation took literally as long as typing the text… not a lot of thought or polish here folks! The main trick is to log into Dabr in one column then refresh the page. Obviously you’ll need to change the hard-coded ‘column’ contents to be whatever you want. And you could probably do a lot to make it look nicer, if you could be bothered.
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I’ve decided to start doing Project 365 and this is my first day’s photo. I’ll keep them (mostly) on my life stream and flickr, but every now and then I might publish them to my main blog.
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In software development, refactoring is the process of improving how code is structured, usually because the original implementation was sub-optimal or the circumstances in which the code is being used have changed. The aim is elegance: that subjective and elusive blend of functionality and simplicity.
My family recently decided to
set a 'theme' for 2010 - a guiding concept for the decisions we make through the year. We chose "simplicity", but it has since occurred to us that what we're really after is elegance. I want to move through life with as little resistance as possible, while still achieving and growing and living. That means cutting things back to their simplest yet most functional, removing the accumulated
cruft, reforming into the optimal shape.
One of the interesting things about elegance is that it is underpinned by a clear purpose. While you can superficially simplify, you cannot hone down to the core functionality without knowing the exact purpose. In order to work towards creating an elegant life I need to clearly define what I want to achieve, which obviously has been
rattling around in my head a little lately.
Essentially, I want to refactor my life.
Although I know how to refactor code, applying those same principles to my life is sure going to be interesting. But I like it as a metaphor because refactoring is most effective when it's incremental and constant. Small achievable improvements done regularly, rather than wholesale re-writes, sounds like a pretty good way to approach life.
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