July 21st, 2007
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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July 5th, 2007
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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July 5th, 2007
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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July 4th, 2007
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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June 27th, 2007
I have used TiddlyWiki, the popular self-contained wiki, before and had even tinkered under the hood a little, but I have never really tried using it in anger. My uses for it until now have been mostly simple tasks such as keeping lists and jottings in central location up in the cloud.
A useful resource, I think, is TiddlySpot, who will host a TiddlyWiki for you and let you access it via your own URL. TiddlySpot also use AJAX to save your changes back to their server. Neat.
In the past I have spent some time tweaking TiddlyWiki’s CSS to customise the look and feel a little, but this has always been fairly shallow exploration.
Since one of the exciting applications of TiddlyWiki is that it can be used as a platform for hosting your website, it seems good sense for us to use it as our own site at Osmosoft. After all, we should ‘eat our own dog food’, right?
With that in mind, today I have been working on restyling a TiddlyWiki in order for it to look and behave like a company website with all the branding considerations that go along with the task. …and I have to say, this is fun!
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June 25th, 2007
I am very excited to be joining BT Osmosoft, an open source development group recently set up by BT and the creator of the excellent Tiddlywiki, Jeremy Ruston. I will be joining the team as Client-side Developer and hope to have lots of fun designing and developing new and exciting web resources in an open source, “web 2.0″ styleee.
BT have had some criticism recently for some bizarre recruitment techniques in the area of web technologies. I am pleased to say that this was certainly not my experience. I met with some very capable and opinionated web professionals and am really looking forward to the experience of working with them.
