All posts by Ryan Cullen

Donut Flavoured Skips?

Other, , ,

An argument in our office this week broke out. Simon claimed that he once had Doughnut Flavoured Skips. The whole team really didn’t believe him. Google searches found a couple of people claiming to remember them but nothing concrete. So I emailed United Biscuits (owners of KP) and got back this reply:

Hi Ryan,

Thank you for contacting us concerning Donut flavoured KP Skips. We can confirm that we did produce these and that they were discontinued quite a few years ago and are unlikely to be manufactured again.

Before any product reaches the shelves, extensive and costly product development and research is undertaken. Only a small percentage of new product concepts reach the retail outlet and even then, products may easily fail to gain the necessary appeal. Sadly, therefore, some products are removed from sale after only a seemingly short time.

However, a longer manufactured product may also be discontinued due to a falling off of popularity, resulting in it no longer being a viable product to produce.

Kind regards,
Sue,
Consumer Services Co-ordinator.

But this wasn’t enough for us, so I asked if they had any images and they came back with this photocopy found in the cupboard.

Donut Skips

Which meant that Simon was right all along.

Ad free mobile browsing…

Mobiles, , , ,

…or how to block adverts like AdBlockPlus does except on your Windows Mobile phone whilst using Opera Mobile.

Having used both AdBlock+ and Greasemonkey on Firefox, one of the things I noticed missing on Google Chrome was the ability to hide the adverts.
Chrome by default doesn’t support any plugins, so I went googling around for a solution and found AdSweep. Turns out that it is possible to have User Scripts in Chrome (the same thing really as Greasemonkey) and after some tweaks and a simple javascript file download the adverts were gone.
Then yesterday I noticed a post on PocketNow.com about using a JavaScript hack to resize the text input box in Opera Mobile.
The trick was using User Javascript (again Greasemonkey), so I wondered if it was possible to use the AdSweep Opera js file on my phone.
The answer is yes 🙂

Simple steps to enabling:

  1. Download the Opera AdSweep.js file from AdSweep.org (I suggest on a computer instead of your phone).
  2. Using which ever filemanager you prefer (I like Total Commander) create a userjs folder in your Opera directory. On my phone using Opera Mobile 9.7 it was \Program Files\Opera Mobile\profile
  3. Copy AdSweep.js from your computer in to your userjs folder on the phone.
  4. In Opera Mobile, type opera:config (no http) in the address bar.
  5. Under User Prefs you should find the following three options:
    • Always Load User Javascript: Tick
    • User Javascript: Tick
    • User Javascript File: \Program Files\Opera Mobile\profile\userjs\ (this is the location on my phone, make sure it matches the path you used above).

    Make sure you press Save at the end

  6. Close Opera (if you have Widgets running and even if you don’t you may prefer a soft reset).

Next time you open Opera you should find adverts start to disappear.

Introducing twhash in time for #bbcqt and #ashes

Twitter, Web Design

For the last few weeks in my spare time, I’ve been trying to create a hybrid of Dabr (a PHP open source twitter client which supports oAuth) and juitter (a javascript jQuery client).

twhash
twhash

Today I can announce twhash.
To do anything you need to be logged in to the site, via the oAuth call to Twitter (don’t worry if you don’t understand, just follow the links on the site).
Then you select the #hashtag you want to follow, and in near real time the tweets appear on the page.
If you want to take part you can enter a tweet at the top of the page, and if you want to reply to a message hit “reply” first and it will fill in the @name and set the flag to link the tweets together.

EXCLUSIVE: Top 10 LibDemBlogs of June

LibDemBlogs

Following on from Charlotte’s post here on her views from the Wikio stats, I’ve gone through MyBlogLog and extracted the top 10 LibDemBlogs based on click throughs.

There are some major caveats in the stats:
a) these are clicks from LibDemBlogs.co.uk, this doesn’t include people who use the RSS feed, those who have sites in their own RSS feed readers/aggregators, sites which are accessed via bookmarks or those linked from other bloggers.
b) I only checked the “top” 50 blogs, as the current method needs me to enter each url in to the MyBlogLog one by one, and wait for the results. This means that a long tail blog could have been missed.
c) Those who post lots will have more clicks to their sites, this doesn’t mean that they are more popular.
Continue reading EXCLUSIVE: Top 10 LibDemBlogs of June →

Another redesign

Web Design

I had been thinking for sometime that the blog was due a makeover, but just couldn’t be bothered to sort it out. Then last week I needed to move LibDemBlogs over to a new server, I planned to move the blog with it, but at some point in the future when I had some free time. Turned out that the old server needed renewing now, so the plan to leave the blog for a bit was turned into a Bank Holiday of coding.
Then with the blog on the new server I just got a white page. I had modified my old template over the years with some random pieces of code and one of them was causing an issue, hours of attempting to fix it resulted in no luck. In the end I decided to re-install WordPress from scratch (whilst keeping the old database) and from here I installed this new theme.
After all this I then discovered I had quiet a few duplicate comments in my database (possiblily from when I moved from Blogger to WordPress, or from Haloscan to WordPress). I deleted all of these, but then discovered around 70 comments weren’t attached to any post. Unfortunatly there doesn’t seem to be any way in WordPress to move comments from one post to another so I had to manual edit the database using mySQL queries as well as trying to work out which post from 2004-2006 people were on about.
Hopefully the backend to the blog won’t need much more work, and I can focus on making a few tweeks to the template in the coming days.

Thank you

Featured, LibDemBlogs

Yesterday afternoon I had to make a big decision. Whether it was finally time to stop working on LibDemBlogs. Attempting to read over 200 blogs every 30 minutes, every day was causing a massive strain on my shared server. I had already received some polite but threatening emails from my hosting company and knew without moving packages to at least a VPS it would continue. The problem being my bank account currently has no cash and the £300 upgrade fee it’s exactly small change. As my server also hosts a couple of local party sites, my blog, LibDig and some other random stuff, I decided that to keep those up and running I could no longer run the cron tab which updated LibDemBlogs in the background.
So I posted a message on LibDemBlogs informing people of what was happening, and asked for donations to get the site running again. In the last 12 hours I have already received 29 donation and three requests for my details to send a cheque (payable to Ryan Cullen, posted to 27 Gibbeson Street, Lincoln, LN5 8JP).
I have now received enough money to pay the upfront costs to host LibDemBlogs for a year and am waiting for the new server to be configured. Once this is done I can start the process of transferring all the files from the old machine to the new one. I hope to get most of this done over the bank holiday weekend.
The last step will be waiting for the DNS servers to update across the internet pointing everyone to the new site.
For the time being I will be making manual updates to LibDemBlogs through out the day.

Ryan

Should Dolly just Wikileak the emails?

Politics,

A few days ago a tweet asked if those emails had been Wikileaked. Which made me think, why doesn’t Dolly just do it?
Firstly there is the “no smoke without fire”, some people will believe that there is something slightly truthful about these allegations.
Secondly, who would really believe that Dolly would be that stupid/clever to put them up there? The finger of blame would surely be pointed towards Paul or the NotW.
Thirdly, if something “did” turn out to be true, just think what kind of response the left could have towards the right?

Lessons from Twitter #2: Don’t use the UK shortdial (86444)…

Twitter,

…for the time being.
For some reason all tweets to 86444 are appearing multiple times in the timeline. Each message has a unique tweet id, and as the Vodafone traffic is only showing one message the fault must be with Twitter (the same issue is happening with a Canadian shortcode 21212)
As I do all my tweeting via the browser on my phone I can’t confirm this, however I believe sending tweets to the UK long number +447624801423 won’t result in duplicate tweets.