Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-19

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Is there an election going on in #Lincoln?

It’s a question one might ask if they visited www.lincoln.gov.uk.

The homepage has no mention of an event taking place on the 6th May

Clicking on Residents still has no clues.

Trying Elections in the sidebar finally takes me to a bland page which has a link for 2010 Elections.

And then visiting this page I am only informed about the seats per ward for the council elections with the rules.

At the moment there isn’t a list of candidates for the City of Lincoln council election for which we have thirds (nominations closed last Thursday).
And amazingly there is no mention of a General Election. No information on what to do if you wish to stand, when they might be counting the result and how to register to vote if you aren’t on the electoral register.

Whilst I knew that this was never going to be the year of the e-lection, this is shocking behavior from the City Council.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-12

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The Tory married tax plans

So it turns out the Tory bribe to those married isn’t really worth much at all.
To start with it’s only worth at the most £150 a year. With the average cost of a wedding around £20,000, it would take 133 years to get your money back.
Secondly it is only available as a tax-break transfer. So if someone in the relationship is earning less than £6,475 you could transfer £750 of your tax allowance to your partner, both earning more than this and it’s pointless.
Thirdly the person receiving the transfer must be earning less than £44,000 a year.

However the greedy nature of me went, at least I’m going to get the cash. That was until I got out the calculator. Currently the wife is getting statutory maternity pay which means that even we won’t get this bribe.

Of course under equality law this tax break is also available to couples in a civil partnership, but really, how many are in the situation where one is earning less than £6,475 a year, whilst their partner is on less that £44,000??

I think I prefer the LibDem proposal to lift the basic rate of tax up to £10,000 instead of this Tory fudge.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-05

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-29

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-22

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Beatrice Mary Cullen

On the 4th March at 2.05am Beatrice Mary Cullen was born weighing 6lb 1oz.

Beatrice
Sometimes I feel like putting my hands up in the air

Many thanks for all the cards, tweets and facebook messages we’ve received.

Just a couple of quick points, until she feels old enough herself:

  • she won’t have a Facebook account
  • she won’t have a Twitter account
  • she won’t have a blog
  • she won’t be joining the Liberal Democrats

She will however have her photo taken at every opportunity and have the images uploaded to both Flickr and Facebook as quickly as possible, as well as cute.argh.tc.

(Un)official Twitter Widget

Do you have a WordPress blog, but hate playing about with the source code of your theme to insert the Official Twitter Widget?
Do you wish that instead you could just have a WordPress widget which did all the hard work for you?
Well now you can, with the (Un)official Twitter Widget.

This simple WordPress widget allows you to have the Twitter widget on your sidebar.

I wrote this widget for a client who wanted the new Official Twitter Widget, however all the WordPress plugins I came across either used the plain old widget, or did their own thing with the data.
It’s based (heavily) on the work from seanys, which used the old widget.

To install either use the built in plugin installer and search for (Un)official Twitter Widget, or visit the WordPress Plugin page and download the file, unzip it, and FTP it to your /wp-content/plugins/ folder.