chrisduran.eu

It’s been pretty hectic with the PhD and Cognicology.com this month: I’m trying to wrangle a trip over to the states in January for a conference related to my PhD, which has taken a fair amount of my time. It is amazing the loops you need to jump through to organise this sort of thing. Between trying to secure a talking position, apply for travel funding and contacting other institutes to visit and talk sciencey things with, I’ve been kept pretty busy. Adding to that, Alborz and I have also been pretty busy with organising and preparing videos for the Cognicology.com site which has been a blast. As exciting as my day-to-day life is (assuming exciting is a relative measure, and you consider paint drying to be an extreme sport) it isn’t really the reason for this post.

The new Cognicology.com design has been up for about a month now, and whilst the design is a definite improvement over the last design, it still isn’t our ideal layout. I actually had a meeting with Al today about the design of the site and we’ve both come to the conclusion that we want something that is a little more ‘full and exciting’ and a lot less minimalist. At around the same time as we’ve been thinking and discussing this, I’ve been following the blog of Smashing Magazine which has some great in-depth articles revolving around online design. I first found Smashing Magazine when I stumbled upon their great collection of monthly desktop wallpaper calendars during one of my procrastinatory searches for an inspirational (and anti-procrastinatory) desktop image. I mention these guys because by chance they have published a great article on the wireframing stage of web design projects.

I’ve knocked up a quick wireframe outline for a possible new Cognicology.com web layout. We will pass it on to the peeps we know in the business and get comments/ideas from them on what they think of the arrangement of elements.

The other cool thing related to Smashing Magazine is that I’ve pre-ordered a copy of their upcoming book, The Smashing Book. To quote them directly:

The Smashing Book is a printed book about best practices in modern Web design. The book shares technical tips and best practices on coding, usability and optimization and explores how to create successful user interfaces and apply marketing principles to increase conversion rates. It also shows how to get the most out of typography, color and branding so that you end up with intuitive and effective Web designs. And lastly, you will also get a peek behind the curtains of Smashing Magazine.

The book is due out late September, and they are giving a pre-order discount of 20% off the price of the book. Check it out here.

Filed under: Projects by Chris

Just a quick update, I was thinking about how I tend to get involved with projects and that I’ve got a number of projects that I am working on at any given time. Some of these projects are for the long haul and others short and sweet. I’ve made a Projects page on this site as a reference for the various projects I’m involved in.

Currently, it has info for my PhD project, Cognicology and WiFi in Australia.

Check it out: http://chrisduran.eu/projects/

Also, I really hope to have some news soon on the all new WiFi in Australia I’ve been developing – stay tuned!

Oh, and I’ve ordered some personal business cards that I hope will arrive in the next week or so – they look very pretty… I’ll put up a screenshot once they get here.

Filed under: general by Chris

I wrote in this article about using Twitter Tools with tweetburner (the twurl.nl URL shortener). I was pretty happy with this solution as it allowed me to measure (to a degree) the traffic interest in various blog posts I put up, be it for WiAU, Cognicology or this blog. It wasn’t the perfect solution however, as the version of Twitter Tools the modified update used was a little old and I always have that little nagging feeling that doesn’t go away when using modded or hacked software.

The deal-breaker for me came when I read an article reviewing the large number of URL shortener services out there. It turns out that tweetburner uses 303 redirection as opposed to 301, which is not ideal for many reasons (see this article for the reasons why, thanks to @problogger).

In the time between my first article and this discovery about the redirection, I had read in the Twitter Tools readme that the developer had created a hook in the code to allow the plugging in of a URL shortening service – the appropriate plugin for wordpress simply needed to be developed, packaged and installed.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a decent package for a URL shortening service using the API calls required to work with Twitter Tools on the wordpress site. After a bit of a search, I found this code snippet that implemented the bit.ly shortening service. This got me excited, because the bit.ly service was on the shortlist of services that I wanted a plugin for. It is one of the shorter URLs generated (14 chars), has some impressive usage tracking and can link multiple twitter accounts to the one bit.ly account. Ace!

I’ve taken the code snippet and packaged it into a ZIP file for upload into the Wordpress plugin manager. You can download it here.

Installing is relatively simple.

1. install and activate the Twitter Tools plugin.

2. install the Bit.ly plugin from this site.

3. BEFORE you activate the Bit.ly plugin, use the inbuilt plugin code editor for wordpress, and change the $login and $api_key values to your bit.ly account login and API key. It is in the first section of code and looks like this (change the bits in red):

function tweet_track($long_url) {
	$login = 'YOUR_LOGIN';
	$api_key = 'YOUR_API_KEY';

4. Activate the plugin.

If all is well, you should now be able to to have post submitting to Twitter, but using the bit.ly service as the URL shortener.

DISCLAIMER: This post itself is also doubling as my testing post for this method. I may or may not be embarrassed by the results.

——

UPDATE (20/4/09 ; 2.5 minutes later): It seems the plugin installation was a success!
Below is the text from my twitter status update:
New blog post: Using bit.ly (trackable URL shortener) with Twitter Tools in Wordpress http://bit.ly/bRa58

Filed under: social media by Chris

I’ve alluded to this before in this article on WiAU (WiFi in Australia), but Google Analytics (GA; or other similar traffic analysis package) is really handy. I have analytics installed on all the sites that I run. When I was looking at the GA report on WiAU, I noticed that about a third of my traffic was coming from a site called Free Sydney Wireless (FSW). I implemented a few more super-technical IT discovery protocols (typing: http://www.freesydneywireless.com/ into a web-browser) and discovered they had done a little writeup on WiAU! Needless to say, I was stoked!

Now, I should additionally mention that before this little discovery I had received an email from a guy about some MESH-related projects he was working on. He actually mentioned FSW in his email. I hadn’t thought anything of it at the time but once I realised there had been a write up and a degree of traffic coming to WiAU from the userbase it all started to piece together.

The end game is that I wouldn’t have known of the writeup today if it hadn’t been for GA as I’d no notification of its existence with the exception of a casual reference to the site in an email. Unfortunately I’m not one for picking up on subtleties so a big ‘traffic analysis’ hammer in the face was something I might just notice, and was just the call I needed.

Now, I would like to let everybody on the internet know that my mother is actually pretty tops. Since I’ve come back from the UK she has been a veritable champion and been there for me and helped me get back on my feet back here in Australia.

Talking about my mum might seem to be a bit of a diversion from the post’s original content, but it isn’t as out of the blue as it might first seem. The reason I am mentioning this is because today is her birthday (I won’t divulge her age on account of my very occasional gentlemanly tendencies) so a BIG HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY MUM!!!

Filed under: IT by Chris