JordanH.net

Facebook, privacy, and why they've got the wrong idea.

// December 10th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Myself, Technology

I’ve been a member on Facebook for a long while. I don’t use it addictively, but it’s been the private social networking place between me and my friends, where we can discuss things we wouldn’t be comfortable with doing if the rest of the world was watching. This is unlike Twitter, which has been my place to rant my thoughts to the rest of the world. It seems like this is about to change.

You’ve probably all been prompted by now to “review” your Facebook privacy settings in their latest update rolled out yesterday. In this dialog you’re nudged towards sharing select things with “Everyone”, but you can keep your current settings if you wish. Since I’d like to keep my private profile to stay how it was, I chose to stick to my existing settings and was on my way.

However, I’m the sort of person who (usually) knows what I’m doing with these sort of things. Already I’ve seen today people unaware they’ve accidentally published their entire profile, pictures and updates to the world, and in today’s all-encompassing digital age where nothing ever completely disappears from the internet, this is a very dangerous area. We’ve all heard of cases where people have posted insulting statuses about their boss, then realised they’re actually their friend. Now it doesn’t even take a friendship with the boss for him to see your incriminating statuses if you’re using Facebook’s “recommended” settings.

Even more infuriating is the now standard amounts of information which are shown on your profile to the public. I have no control over who sees my friends, my pages or even worse, the events I’m attending with the specific times and dates. Surely this stuff should be under the same controls as everything else?

It’s clear why Facebook are doing this – as already explained on various websites, they’ve struck a deal with Microsoft’s Bing search engine to provide public status updates to its searches. They are expected to do a similar deal with Google next year. To do this they’ve nudged their members to share all and covering it up by saying how much more streamlined it will be.

For me, Facebook was a private place I could chat with my friends, but if they can’t guarantee the privacy of my posts, events and profile, then I’ll think twice before posting that update or RSVPing to an event. I think they’ve got the complete wrong idea.

Jordan

PHPNW 2009

// October 10th, 2009 // No Comments » // Events, Technology

PHPNW 2009 was AWESOME

This year it was held at the Manchester Conference Centre which seemed a much more suited venue than last year at the G-MEX, with two theatre-style rooms and a nice hall used for food and exhibitors.

Since I was helping out, I couldn’t see all the talks I was hoping to see, but they were all recorded and I think they will be online soon. However, the talks I did see were really interesting and I came away from the event with a load of things I’m meaning to follow up on!

Probably one of the best talks was ‘Tools and Talent’ by Plusnet developer Rowan Merewood. It was quite insightful into how to pester a development group into using a new tool and how to prepare for a large-scale migration between platforms. It was also rather humorous

It was quite good to see Microsoft doing a talk today. Despite the heckling, they showed off their new WebsiteSpark program and a new program called SketchFlow part of their Expression Studio series. They also had a prize draw, in which I won some Microsoft Points (and was also given some more by Phil – thanks!)

The day finished off with a meal and a free bar sponsored by Sun. There are further events on in the morning at the Museum of Science and Industry – I’ll try to get there but can’t guarantee anything.

On the whole, the event surpassed the expectations set by last year’s conference, and had a great line-up of talks and speakers as well as an equally-awesome group of attendees. See you all next year!

Jordan

WordCamp UK 2009

// July 21st, 2009 // No Comments » // Events, Technology

Well I’ve just about recovered from a superb weekend down in sunny Cardiff for WordCamp UK. It was interesting, to say the least, and I met up with loads of amazing people who I have a lot of respect for in the industry!

Having booked the hotel at the last minute, I headed down early Saturday morning, made it down in about four hours. The morning started with a quick introduction session, going around the 130 people in the room, each giving quick overview of themselves and something they do with WordPress. I thought this worked really well and showed off the many interests and uses people have for WordPress. Surprisingly, it seemed that over half of the room make some living from WordPress too.

One of the notable sessions I attended was Jonny Allbut’s presentation about the WordPress site development process. It was really interesting and quite detailed, and named quite a few useful plugins. Another interesting session was Simon Dickson’s talk on WordPress being used in the government, and the controversy surrounding the launch of Number10.gov.uk on WordPress.

The evening social on the Saturday was really good. It was great to chat with people and I could put names to faces of people I’ve known for quite a while on Twitter and the like! I also had some time to chat with Matt Mullenweg, who was really interesting and called me a ‘natural’ with David Coveney’s camera

There was quite a bit of heated discussion in the wrap-up session when it was suggested that an enterprise-aimed event along the lines of WordCamp should also be run. Personally I don’t like the idea that much because I fear of it alienating the community and taking away the community spirit from WordPress.

However, on the whole, the weekend was a great success and I am looking forward to WordCamp UK 2010, which has been penned in at 17th-18th July 2010. However, I’m sure I’ll see a lot of you around before then, if not in conversation online! Thanks to everyone who organized, presented at, and attended the event!

Jordan

UPDATE: Can’t believe I forgot about the highlight of the weekend – the free bricks mints given out by the hotel. Oh we had a lot of fun with those

eXpansys

// June 25th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

I’m really ticked off right now. I should be writing a post about how I’ve installed OS X on an Acer Aspire A150 but instead the damn netbook hasn’t even arrived. On Sunday, I ordered a Acer Aspire A150 netbook from Amazon, apparently via eXpansys, and opted for the £5.50 “Express Delivery” option. I thought it’d be great – here by Wednesday or so and I could start playing around with it.

On Tuesday I got an email from Amazon telling me my order had been dispatched. Apparrently I could expect it either yesterday or today. However now I’ve just got an email from eXpansys saying the netbook won’t even be dispatched until tomorrow, quoting “overwhelming demand” for the problem. I’ve never known “Express Delivery” on a small item to take 6 days! Oh, and the only thing I’ll be getting back is a £5 voucher to use on eXpansys’ website. Oh great. I’ll save it for something I could do without for a few weeks.

Ideally I’d like my delivery charge refunded – this is scandalous and even though Amazon say it shipped yesterday and should be here today at the latest, it’s not even been dispatched.

Well I know who I won’t be buying from in future.

And I'm Back!

// June 20th, 2009 // No Comments » // Events, Myself, Technology

After a little bit of downtime (you can blame some bloody Turkish hackers for that), my blog is back on new servers. Everything pretty much was salvaged but I wanted to move it somewhere where security might be a bit tighter so it’s now sitting on what is hopefully a rather secure VPS!

I am hoping to post more often on here now – I get so many ideas for posts and by the time I get round to writing them, I think to myself that the idea has probably been and gone, and that I’ve probably missed the boat with it. Maybe that won’t happen so much in future.

I would like to write more about some of the music I’ve been listening to recently as I’m quite a big fan of indie artists and move through different groups quite quickly. I’m also willing to take some suggestions of new bands to try!

Well it’s 1:30am now and I’m falling asleep. Before I go, just want to send some link-love over to Francis’ new blog – A General Repository. He’s jumped aboard the WordPress bandwagon now and I’m looking forward to reading some of his upcoming posts! Check it out at http://ageneralrepository.wordpress.com/

Jordan

Twitter Spam…

// May 20th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

I’m probably a bit behind the times here, but it seems as if spam on Twitter is becoming quite a big problem. I was looking through the trending topics’ tweets and found a few tweets with links that appeared genuine – using redirection services such as bit.ly. To my surprise, when I clicked on them, I was redirected to some spammy sites selling me pyramid schemes.

Other than the manual process of blocking accounts which post spam, what other measures can Twitter do to prevent it? It is obviously is a rather big problem.

Thinking Outside the Box

// April 7th, 2009 // No Comments » // Coding, Technology

WordPress Themes have been around for a long while, but until very recently, many themes have been simple blog layouts and an extra page template here and there. However, there has been an increasing trend, arguably started by premium themes, where nifty uses of WP’s functions have allowed for unique features and more in themes.

Custom Loops

Custom Loops is probably the most significant of these changes. By letting the user put all their testimonials in one category, you could hide them from the main post display, then run a custom loop somewhere else on the page to display just the testimonials.

An easy way of doing this would be to run the query_posts function choosing only posts from one category, or even pulling a single, random post. Then run a loop like normal, and the post would be displayed.

Custom Fields

Custom Fields are also something which, until recently, seem to have been underused. It’s easy to get a custom field for a post inside your loop, just use the get_post_meta function and you’re good to go.

These have been used for image resizers, video embedding code and even changing the URLs for people reading your RSS feed.

Theme Options Page

Theme Options pages are becoming popular in free themes as well as premium ones now. Aimed towards users who don’t want to dive into their theme’s code, they can help setup a theme and more. These are more complicated pieces of code, but it proves they can be done.

It’s Not A Post!

The whole idea of a post being a couple of paragraphs of text has become less specific, with a post now being considered more of an abstract concept for a piece of content – videos, mini-updates and a lot more. The success of WordPress in part can be attributed to its extremely flexible themes system as that is what has pushed the boundaries of the software and let it become flexible.

This is ultimately the thinking outside of the box which many themes are heading to, and it will be interesting to see what new ideas and techniques are going to be used in the future.

National Rail Enquiries iPhone App

// March 27th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

You may remember the popular MyRail Lite app which was released onto the iTunes App Store a while ago and then quickly withdrawn. Those who managed to grab the application before it was removed could still use it, although very recently a notification was displayed telling the users that National Rail Enquiries, the service which provides the data, had refused to renew their license with Kizoom, the parent company of MyRail. This effectively meant that from 31st March 2009 you would not be able to get the train information. Then it started getting awkward:

Very recently, National Rail Enquiries released their own iPhone App which does practically the same as MyRail Lite, however it is priced at £4.99 and there is no other alternative if you want to get the train times on your iPhone. How can this be fair – they prevent any other company using their data and then have full control of their pricing. I’m pretty sure that in any real world scenario – for example the recent BAA airports break-up – the Competition Commission would intervene. After all, information which is effectively promoting National Rail’s services should be free? Isn’t it public knowledge?

Any suggestions about what can be done? Is it worth starting a government petition or writing to the Office of Fair Trading? I’d appreciate your thoughts on this.

Is the cloud really the best place?

// February 23rd, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Technology

Every day people are raving about “web 2.0″ – how we’re moving all of our data to the “cloud” and how we can access anything, anywhere. We’re also being a lot more open about what we do online – especially when it comes to social networking. Only the other day TechCrunch suggested that Last.fm might be sharing user data with the RIAA, but when many users responded in uproar, other users came to the defence repeating that the users should have had common sense in the first place.

Why are we so open about sharing all of our data online? Is it the ease of use of sharing pictures on Facebook or Flickr – or is it the speed at which we can share them with friends, compared to the old days of sending them as file attatchments in emails? How much can we trust that our data will not be deleted, and not shown to advertisers or other third-parties?

When Facebook recently changed their privacy policies to remove a provision which stated that users could remove their data whenever they like, users responded with uproar. Eventually, Facebook backed down on their stance and re-added the clause to their privacy policy, but the question still remained as to what they could do with your data.

So how far can we go until everything that is ours is hosted in the cloud? How much of a risk to our privacy does this represent? Is the cloud really the best place?

For the short-term, I think that the cloud is beneficial to the growth of the internet, and is certainly the best solution for now, but in the future, we may look to another solution.

Site Updates

// February 22nd, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

It seems a long time since I last posted on my blog – too long in fact. So I’ve decided to get a new design for my blog, make it my own (a bit) and start blogging regularly again. In the spirit of refreshing, I’ve removed a lot of redundant posts from a long while ago, and I’ve also removed the asides. There will probably be quite a few dead links left around the place, but they should be cleared up pretty quickly.

What do you think of the new design and the new logo? Feel free to leave a comment with your opinions!