Sebastian Grant

It seems that the world has finally woken up to micro-blogging. For many years ICQ, IM clients, forums etc have offered facilities for displaying a “Mood Message” or “Status Message” to sum up, in one brief sentence, what’s happening in our lives and how we are feeling at THIS precise moment in time.

Personally, I often use mood messages to decide whether or not I actually want to talk to someone. For example, women with status messages such as “Feeling a little tender and needing a hug” should be avoided at all costs; anyone with a status such as “anoyd wiv ma bst m8” should be instantly removed from your contacts list BUT “Anyone fancy a pint?” is your new best friend.

Recently (well recently in the grand scheme of things!) Facebook has capitalised on the need we all feel, to tell everyone what we are doing, every second of the day. Reading and writing status updates probably makes up a good third of what we all do on the site. It stands to reason that sooner or later (and again, I mean in the grand scheme of things) someone would release a web service that provides ONLY status updates. Of course, I’m talking about twitter.com which has recently come to the forefront of the great unwashed’s attention.

(NB: For the record, I first started tweeting back in May February ’07 – but seeing as noone else was doing it, I abandoned the idea! See twitter.com/beetlejoose for evidence!)

Now that I’ve finally got my blog back up and running I thought it was about time I started to actually use it for good.

WordPress has fantastic support for adding custom functionality via Plugins and Widgets; I’ve not yet tapped into the power of these facilities although I know I have some good creative ideas and the ability to implement them.

As the title suggests, I am currently working on a mashup using Last.fm’s Api, TradeDoubler’s links with Apple and WordPress’s fantastic documentation to provide a widget for your blog that shows your favourite iTunes with affiliates links to generate a little extra revenue.

This post will serve as the installation guide, support information and release platform once I’ve completed the plugin.

OK, after my failed attempt to install Windows 7 a couple of hours ago I decided that I’d watch the Apple Keynote before hitting the sack, whilst this was playing on the iMac I fired up the PC to check that my failed attempt hadn’t destroyed my current (XP) installation and to test the DVD again.

Well the tempation got the better of me. I decided to run the installation from within Windows XP to see if I could get the files copied and unpacked whilst within Windows before restarting into the low level installation stuff.

Well, after expanding 30% of the files the PC restarted anyway! I thought “Here we go, it’ll get to 62% and die again” – but no! Along came 63%… then 64%… 65% etc!

So after unpacking all the files we get a restart, then the main installation, then yet another reboot…!

So finally got it booting up and doing the “preparing for first boot” stuff, usual location, language and timezone questions then very, very simple network installation, much like that on Leopard, one more reboot and I’ll be rolling deep with Microsoft Windows 7!

…erm hold on… it’s come up with “Preparing Windows for first use” again… what’s going on here? It’s ok, false alarm kids – just the desktop needed preparing… (whew)

So I’m now in! I’ll give you the full run down of my experiences of Windows7 over the next week or so, but the first thing I have to tell you tonight is that I am shocked (but happy) that Microsoft are offering the chance to install AVG AntiVirus rather than that abomination known as Norton!

For now friends, goodnight!