Matt’s Journal

Plurk: The New Twitter?

Posted by Matt under Angry, Social Media, Tech

Yesterday I was viewing my Twitter feed and catching up on any Tweets I had missed when I came across a few people mentioning a new service named Plurk. Thinking it was another social media aggregator, I scrolled on to read the rest of my feeds.

But then my curiosity got the better of me. Clicking into the search bar at the top of my browser, thinking that I was about to discover and online version of the board game “Kerplunk”, I typed in the name and swiftly hit enter.

Firstly Plurk’s meta-description of their site is as follows:

Plurk is a social journal that let’s you publish, share your thoughts, emo-ness, “!%#%”#” and loves. What is up, my friend? See what other people are doing …

OK, so it’s a social platform that can take the piss out of itself, I like that. Looking at the front page, it sells itself as a very similar service to Twitter, one that boasts a few extra features and a much nicer user interface. It also has a logo which is a Headless Dog…..The screenshot below demonstrates the layout:

Having befriended a few friends from Twitter on Plurk, I set to work trying out the service. First impressions are that the timeline is a very good idea, it shows you who posted and when and allows you to be able to reply to their message with a click to open a dropdown reply form (shown again below):

Word on the internet is that Plurk don’t want user’s developing third party applications for this service, although I have seen no official word on this. Twitter’s real plus is that it allows you to post and receive via SMS, browser, addon or client. So far only Gtalk is supported by Plurk.

There is however a clever sidebar addition for Firefox which utilises the mobile version of the site. You can download this addon by clicking here.

Have I sold Plurk and you think you want to try it? Sign up via this link and you will automatically be added to my friends list.

Feature Updates

Posted by Matt under Angry, Blogging, Happy, Tech, Update

You may have already noticed that I have rolled out a few feature updates. Let me tell you a bit about them.

1. OpenID Support

OpenID is an open standard that lets you sign in to other sites on the Web using little more than your personal URL. This means less usernames and passwords to remember and less time spent signing up for new sites. The plugin installed on m4tt.net allows commenters to use their OpenID to assure their identity as the author of the comment. It will also provide a framework for future OpenID-based services as OpenID functionality and it’s user base increases.

For example:

2. Post Rating

This plugin will allow users to vote for blog content on m4tt.net. It will allow me to gauge what readers of the blog are enjoying and also show in my sidebar what people are rating the highest for people like yourself to see. To use this feature, look at the bottom of any post on this blog and a rating bar should be visible for you to use.

Thanks to honest_ape for the inspiration.

3. RSS Updates

Some readers of this blog have had problems subscribing to my Feedburner RSS feeds. In order to allow people to syndicate with this blog and read my content in an RSS reader but not use the Feedburner URL, please bookmark or syndicate the following URL: http://www.m4tt.net/feed/atom/

Thats about it really! Any suggestions or comments, please do leave them using the forms provided.

She’s Deeeead…..She’s Not Dead

Posted by Matt under Angry, Blogging, Happy, Spendage

This post has actually nothing to do with anyone being dead. I had originally titled it “She’s Back” but then it reminded me of the awesome “The Office” clip posted above and rolled with the alternative.

Yes, indeed, Katie has returned to me in all her sun kissed beauty (lucky so-and-so). The two weeks in Gran Caneria have left us re-energised and made us really look forward to our upcoming wedding even more (let’s not play it down, it’s gonna be awesome!), so although I missed her, it has helped us reaffirm how we feel.

I spent most of my Sunday hoovering and cleaning the house for when the family returned, by all accounts I did a good job. Harry was fine the whole fortnight but within a few hours of them being home, he had Katie’s parents up twice in the night. The dog was very well behaved with me so I don’t know what is going on there!

Not really much of an update to be honest, just wanted to check in and let you know I was still alive.

Lonely :(

Posted by Matt under Angry, Blogging, Funny, Sport

At 3am on Monday morning, Katie and her parents departed for Gran Canaria. It’s a new experience for me being so far away from Katie, especially as the biggest distance we used to be from each other in the past was say 8 miles, when we both lived with our parents and we had to drive to each other’s houses.

I have been a right old house husband, I have been feeding the fish, feeding the dog, cleaning the kitchen, loading and unloading dishwashers, things not massively new to me but weird when it’s you on your own.

Luckily, yesterday was a lovely day. Awaking early, doing the above mentioned processes and getting showered and ready, I drove over to my friend Luke’s house who was down at his parents for the weekend getting stuff to take back up to his flat in London. For an hour we consulted various friends as to what we could do for the day, the eventual winner being golf.

Meeting up with my other friend Bacon, the three of us hit the course with our various irons and putters, taking in the midday heat. Carding a round of 47, I came in the eventual winner four shots ahead of both Bacon and Luke, Tiger Woods has nothing on me (see below!):

Coming back for some dinner and to watch the football, we put our feet up and waited for dinner to digest before playing some Wii Fit and Wii Sports. We tried making some funny videos, I will upload them later and you can see what you think.

The thing was that after these guys had left, I was alone in this big old house with just the dog for company, it was very surreal. It really makes you thankful for the time you spend with the one you love because when they are not there, you feel like half a person.

The biggest annoyance since Katie left has been the dog, four times in the night he barked at what he thought was an intruder, I knew otherwise, the house is locked down tighter than Fort Knox.

One day down, thirteen more until she returns

Clients: Who Needs ‘Em?

Posted by Matt under Angry, Rant, Work

I work full time for a training company, but i also run my own media company with 3 other people. We have been doing work for a client of ours for about eight or nine months now and we have had nothing but troubles.

It ranges from non-payment, to going back on decisions regarding print media and website additions, to plainly not doing hearing or receiving anything from them at all.

The most recent example of the lack of coordination between our client and his business partners are when I received a phone call this morning. It went a bit like this:

Business Partner: Hi Matt, where’s my access to the website?
Me: I can’t give you access, we are building a website in the background and I don’t want to stop our progress if you were to add anything to the root of the domain.
Business Partner: Oh, so whats happening with the site? Seeing as it’s my website, I should be able to see it should I not?
Me: Yes, Ok, if you want to see it that’s not a problem.
Business Partner: So, send me details of the log on and I will have a look at it.

You might read that and deduce that he is just a little frustrated and merely wants to see the website. The problem is, this guy has thrown his weight about before with the end result being that we went to the client and simply asked; “Who are we working for?!”. The client was telling us one thing and the business partner another.

The client apparently had a word and nothing was heard from his business partner…..until now.

To me it’s all part and parcel of the job, but if we had received the wording, the design specs and the notes we needed from the client when we asked, we would be a hell of a lot further down the road with this project.

ISP Troubles with Pipex

Posted by Matt under Angry, Internet, Tech

I signed up with Pipex about three years ago now, their service was highly recommended by friends and they were relatively good value. In April I saw that we were being billed £24.99 a month for 2MB Broadband when they offered 8MB “Unlimited” Broadband for exactly the same price! Noticing that we could get increased speeds, I switched the service over (but was made to accept a 12 month contract) and everything ran super fast……..but not for long.

Within a month of having the service, the download speeds plummeted, both for HTTP and Bittorrent transfers. I went from having 800kb/s+ to 30kb/s for my torrents and my downloads (even from Microsoft) topped out at 500kb/s.

Whilst I agree that ISP’s should engage the “Power Users” and stop them from downloading massive files, I probably average 10GB of downloads via Bittorrent per month, that wouldn’t even register on their leader board of people who abuse the service.