Hawksworx

My Thursday nights (and, I fear, Friday mornings) may never be the same again, now that I have joined the gang of pub reviewers who participate in Fullpint Thursdays.

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Over the last couple of days I have got to meet some members of the BT SDK team. I’m likely to be working quite closely with some of these guys over the coming months in my role at Osmosoft and so it was great to get to meet them and see how they work.

There is a great feeling of energy and enthusiasm in the team, which I found infectious. I personally am rather excited about getting the chance to play with some of the cool features of the BT SDK to build some funky web apps. As a newcomer to the telecoms sector, I find that the functionality being exposed through the SDK are inspiring me to build all kinds of gizmos, widgets, gadget, and do-hickies. I’ll be shouting about some of those here soon, no doubt.

..but I find myself wondering, what would you build?

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Last weekend continued the theme of the wedding season, this time with my brother’s stag-do. The English summer was threatening to overshadow our day at York races by treating us to weeks upon weeks of drizzle but we got lucky with a fantastic break in the weather which latest exactly one day! Perfect blues skies and glorious sunshine made York racecourse look superb.

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This weekend I was lucky enough to attend the wedding of two of my great friends, Simon and Helen. It was the first of many weddings arranged for this summer that I’ve been looking forward to.

The organisers of Wimbledon couldn’t secure good weather for their big event, but Simon and Helen were rather more fortunate. The weather was absolutely perfect and was the icing on the cake of a fabulous day.

The bride and groom were both totally relaxed and seemed to soak up every moment of the day, having fun and celebrating in grand style. Brilliant!

&[Osmosoft]:http://www.osmosoft.com Since we recently redeveloped the [Osmosoft][] web site, we figured that we had better have some decent analytics on the site to monitor the activity. Google Analytics is perfectly good enough for our needs, and so I set about implementing it.

After signing up for a free Google Analytics account, it is a simple task to start tracking the hits on your site. You just need to add the javascript code that google generates for you onto into your code. The best way to do this in TiddlyWiki, is to modify the MarkupPostHead tiddler. This tiddler exists precisely for this kind of task. It inserts code into the end of the Head of your TiddlyWiki page.

The code you insert here looks something like this:

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script;
<script type="text/javascript">
  _uacct = "UA-123456789";
  urchinTracker();
;/script>

With this code in place, Google will start collecting information about the traffic to your site and present it to you via your Google Analytics account. But there is a problem, and that is that you really want to know what content your visitors are looking at within your site. You want their navigation in your site to be recorded too. On a traditional site, that’s no problem. Each page just has this same bit of javascript included and Google can register hits on each page. In TiddlyWiki however, everything happens within a single page so this kind of mechanism won’t quite do the job.

Thankfully both Google Analytics and TiddlyWiki are flexible enough for us to find a pretty simple solution.

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Last night the newly assembled Osmosoft crew attended WikiWednesday - a regular meeting of technologists and business folk who share an interest in matters of all things wiki. These monthly sessions are an opportunity for people to discuss the use of wikis and any issues that surround them, from techie issues to business cases and adoption patterns.

We were lucky enough to be given the opening slot to demonstrate our latest toy - an implementation of TiddlyWiki which leveraged BT’s SDK to initiate phone calls. UnaMesa’s Martin Budden and our own Paul Downey demonstrated what we dubbed ‘Speed Geeking’, a little mashup which interpreted a set of contact details gathered from the WikiWednesday attendees as hCards and then randomly paired up the contacts so that a phone call could be created between each pair. It isn’t typical to hear a speaker at such an event remind the audience to “please keep your phones turned on!”, but that was how this session began. It ended with a room full of people coupled via phone calls, waving at each other across the room as they identified which stranger they had been connected to. Ring-tone chaos!

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I recently commented on the fun I was having repurposing a TiddlyWiki to be the new Osmosoft website. I’m pleased to say that the site is now live.

The fun thing is, that here at Osmosoft we like the open source approach, and that even extends to our website. We invite anyone to offer improvements to the site, and since it is built using TiddlyWiki it is easy for you to grab the code with a quick File > Save As and then you can set about making whatever changes you like, right from within the site. Confused? Well it took me a little while to come to grips with this way of working, and it is becoming apparent that I have just uncovered the tip of the iceberg, but once you get started, this way of working can be really fun and can be very efficient.

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