Archive for January, 2010

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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Really happy with how the first came out - this is the first bug macro that I've been happy with. 

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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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