Category Archives: Uncategorized

Monitoring Twitter via RSS search result feeds

Want to make better use of Twitter, getting a better signal to noise ratio, spotting tweets about things you’re interested in without having to wade through things you’re not?

Use the Twitter search, and enter terms you’re interested in, seperated by OR (e.g. badgers OR mushrooms OR snakes), then hit search – as you’d expect, you’ll find any tweets mentioning any of the terms you mentioned.

Now, in the top right of the results page, is a “Feed for this query” link – this gives you an RSS feed for this search which you can subscribe to in your RSS reader of choice. Now, you have a feed you can monitor for anything that’s of interest for you, whether that be your personal interests, or your company’s brand and terms related to your target market (e.g. hosting OR domains OR ecommerce etc).

Of course, you could just hand-craft the feed URL, if you’d prefer – it will look like:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?lang=en&q=badgers+OR+mushrooms+OR+snakes

It’s easy enough to change that to whatever you want :)

Quick Fibonacci calculations are nothing new

Just read this post by Ben Newman (found via Reddit).

Now, the use of C++ templates to calculate the value at compile time rather than runtime is midly clever and amusing (if also impractical and convoluted) but the fact that it can calculate a Fibonacci number quickly is nothing new; it’s solely down to remembering the values you’ve already calculated, and not calculating them again needlessly.
Continue reading Quick Fibonacci calculations are nothing new

Happy New Year!

Just a quick post to say Happy New Year everyone! I hope 2009 will be a good year for you.

And, in case you’re wondering, no, I’m not sad enough to be sitting in front of my computer on NYE; this post was scheduled several days ago ;)

Christmas Blackberry wallpaper

I decided to whack some new wallpaper on my Blackberry, so grabbed a Christmassy image and resized it to the right size (320×240) for my Blackberry (an 8310 "Curve").

In case anyone else wants it, here it is:

Christmassy wallpaper for Blackberry (320x240)

I can’t remember where it came from originally, I found it via some other blog; if anyone knows the source, feel free to let me know.

Empty page after posting comments fixed

It seems that anyone posting a comment on my blog (and me, when I created posts) got a completely empty page. The comment or post was saved successfully, but no page was displayed afterwards.

A quick look in the error logs showed the following:


[Sat Dec 20 14:18:56 2008] [error] [client 82.18.18.58] PHP Catchable fatal error: Object of class WP_Error could n
ot be converted to string in /websites/davidp/blog/wordpress-svn/wp-content/plugins/sitemap/sitemap.php on line 1026

So, it was the Google Sitemaps plugin causing the problem – disabling it cured the issue. I’ll see if there’s a newer version of the plugin which solves this.

UK2 Christmas Competition

The UK2 Christmas Competition was launched today- as we did in previous years, it’s a simple advent-calendar based idea – you can enter once per day, every day up to and including Christmas Eve.

Top prize is a 17” MacBook Pro or a Samsung 46″ LCD TV with Home Cinema System, with runner-up prizes of 3 * UK2 “Silver” Dedicated Servers for 1 year and 10 * UK2 “Home” Web Hosting packages for 1 year.

Just a shame UK2 staff can’t enter! :)

Geograph hits one million photos

Paul Dixon writes that the Geograph project has now reached one million photographs!

A fantastic achievement for the project, congratulations!

In case you’ve not seen it, the Geograph British Isles project aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland.

There are some fantastic photographs on there, it’s well worth a look, and it’s easy to contribute your own photos too (see some by me).
Continue reading Geograph hits one million photos