Toluu

Development on a Shoestring

How to put the Facebook ‘Like’ button on your WordPress blogApril 21

Facebook has announced its Facebook for Websites service the their f8 developers conference.  Along with a bunch of other services is a fairly simple little button you can add to any site called the Like Button.  It works in exactly the same way as liking something on your Facebook newsfeed, but it’s for any page on the internet. 

This is what the button looks like when it’s put onto a page:

 

It shows the profile picture of the person who’s viewing the page (if they’re logged into Facebook) and how many other people have liked that page. You can see an example of this on my wife’s site Pea Pilly Bean *.

If you click the Like lutton on any page, it will add a like to that page & post a message on your newsfeed that you liked that page, it looks like this:

NSW Rural Fire Service current incidents mapOctober 26 2009

The NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) has provided an RSS feed with the latest updates on bush fires in NSW for a while now, and it’s a geoRSS feed with lat/long data included so you can see where each incident happens.  However it wasn’t until this week, when their incident and major updates feeds were included in the data.australia.gov.au repository that I noticed something else.  They don’t just have a location point for each fire, they have the actual boundary coordinates included.

This means that Google Maps can create a polygon overlay of each fire, showing its size and location.  I’ve included it in Google Maps, you can see it here.  Each place marker includes useful information like description of the location, what council area it’s in, what type of fire it is and the latest updates.

Oh look, another wonderful music service that I won’t be able to accessOctober 21 2009

News is that Google will be partnering with iLike and LaLa to provide a music service.  TechCrunch has been pimping the news the last couple of days, with the report being that an announcement is due next week. There is much discussion over what form it will take.  GigaOm’s Paul Bonanos is sceptical that the new feature will involve actually selling streaming/downloads, where as TechCrunch is more upbeat.

While I am interested in seeing what Google’s play will be with this (assuming that the rumours aren’t all hot air) it really underwhelms me, as I know pretty much for sure that I won’t be able to access it here in Australia. Or if it is just a music search engine, the vast majority of its results will be unavailable to me. Pandora is unavailable, last.fm has us on the ‘lite’ version,

Update for TweetDeck desktop, good but still not perfect yetOctober 16 2009

TweetDeck have updated their desktop version to version 0.31. There are a fair few improvements. The main one is updated alerts interface which looks much nicer (shiny glass-like semi transparent look) and is more customisable,  including the ability to only show alerts for certain columns.  You can also cycle through the new tweets in the alert box, similar the way Digsby’s alert box works.  You can also pick which quarter of the screen the notification box shows on and whether to see the full alert box or just the new items summary (see below).

 

It would be nice if you could muck with the opacity on the alerts, but no biggie.

Steven Hodson over on The Inquisitr has done a good rundown of TweeDeck’s features and what he does & doesn’t like.  He still isn

Command & Conquer Red Alert coming to the iPhone & iPod touchOctober 14 2009

It seems like every week or so an new major gaming title is coming out on the iPhone platform.  This one has me very excited.  I loved C&C I had pretty much all the titles and Red Alert was one of the best, remember the Attack Dogs & the Tesla Coils?