It’s been just over a month now since I started tweeting. I came out of discussions at work and thoughts I had about promoting my site. I didn’t know much about micro-blogging, and I felt my opinions were strong, but my knowledge too weak.

I think it’s fair to say I have immersed myself in the world of twitter enough now to give a more balanced view on the subject and how it has changed my digital life.

I am happily following public figures, comedians, sports men, MP’s as well as friends for a few weeks and keeping track of what they have to tell me. But I soon found out it’s not all about what you follow, but what you can search.

Searching on twitter seems to fall into two categories. You can search for posts and people who might interest you, or you can search for hashtags.

Hashtags are really interesting. People use them to join debates on twitter, or follow public mood on news events. They also use them to discuss what’s happening on tv programmes, and public events. I’ve found that twitter brings me news loads faster than the sky and the bbc. Twitter is even faster than google.  Just have a look at what is trending on twitter right now…

Most news organisations need to write a story, get it checked out by a subeditor, then hit the publish button. However in tweet land, every individual can write a report and send it. Anyone can create a hash tag too.

But twitter is an individual’s take on a subject. Not a balanced BBC view. So sometimes they are highly positive, sometimes negative, but you can bet your bottom dollar the next tweet is different!

I was at a conference last week where lots of people in the room were tweeting about the presentations. A bit rude to be on your phone? No. Many of the presenters embraced it. It gave the audience an unobtrusive feedback channel. Some even expanded on a section of their talk because of tweets from inside the room.

I’m starting to lose my way with Facebook. FB security setting have been trying to make us share more with the people outside of our perceived community for years now. We all know what they’re up to and attempt to lock ourselves down, keep people out. Twitter is public by default. That means for those of us who are cautious about how people see us, we consider each tweet. Some how on FB I think I’m in a safer environment, but I’m not. Sometimes the most restrictive permission is ‘friend of friends’. That’s still someone I don’t know!

I like the mix that google plus gives me. The ability to group people together easily, and let different groups see different things. I can post ‘gweets’ as I like to call them too. But nobody is on the platform. So what’s the point?

I think for the main part. Twitter is ticking all my boxes at the moment. Except for perhaps one. Galleries. But I could always resurrect my coppermine gallery I guess.

What do you think about twitter? Why not comment?

I’ve just seen an advert on tv for Vodafones Just Text Giving (justtextgiving.com) and after looking into it for a few minutes, I’m really impressed.

Some of my friends and work mates over the years have sent me links in emails to their just giving site when they have been running a marathon or abseiling down a building. I’ll be honest, I’m always in two minds about pledging. Not because I don’t think the activity they are undertaking is not worth a few quid, and not because the charities don’t need supporting, but rather because of justgiving.com.

Just Giving is a privately owned profitable company who happily take 5% of your donation. They explain that their tools in fact save charities money, by not having to do the admin themselves, which undoubtedly does generate a cost. What irritates me is, although this information is on their site, they don’t publicise it all that well on their pledging pages. They do make it clear that card charges will reduce your donation, they don’t explain that from Charlie Simpsons amazing appeal for Haiti, (which would never have got the worlds eyes (and wallets) engaged without the use of Just Giving) from the fantastic £210,000 raised, Just Giving walked away with over £10,000. Quite a bit of admin that.

After watching Vodafones advert I was sceptical, however when I looked into it further, Vodafone claim 100% of the pledged money goes to your chosen cause or charity. Not only that, your texts are free and don’t come out of your bundle. They’ve also made a facility to allow gift aid on your donation, increasing British tax payers donations by 25%. Well done Vodafone.

My only criticism is that the charity has to wait between 45 and 135(!) days before getting their cash.

So the surprising thing is that this is a joint venture by Just Giving and Vodafone. Wether this means that JG are changing their ways, or big old Vodafone have made them an offer they can’t refuse, time will tell. In the mean time, when your acquaintance decides to cartwheel from Lands End to John O’Groats and sets up a JG page. Whizz them a quick email and suggest a text short code too!

Just one question remains. If people text swim36 £3 to 70070, where does the three quid go?

So I expanded on my Twitpic service in this post admw.tv/l. However people keep asking me in the street, Adam, how do you make those little web addresses on your site, and on twitter? Well let me tell you…
 It goes without saying that you need a fairly short domain to start with. There’s no point registering myurlshorteningservice.org.uk because it will use far too many characters. Find something snappy, memorable with the shortest tld you can afford. I registered admw.tv. Other alternatives are .cc .eu and .im and they all have different costs to them. Dot EU addresses are currently on offer at my usual registrar and are currently only £2.99 per year. The dot TV i’m using costs £9.99 per year.

I looked around the interweb, did some searches, read some reviews and downloaded two scripts.

Spiral URL‘s beauty is in its simplicity. A simple looking page with an input box and a submit button. You’re also free to hack the page as much as you like, but are politely requested to leave some bits of code that link to their website.
I was sold on this project but for three things. There is no WordPress intregration, no detailed statistics on the usage of the URL and its open to the public. Without some HTML skills, it’s open to everyone to use, or abuse.

YoURLs stand for Your own URL shortener and obviously does just that. It’s private as standard, but could be used without authentication on a private intranet where it won’t be abused. It has a good statistics section giving you an idea on how many people have clicked the link, where they are, where they found the link as well as the colour of their socks. Finally there is a fantastic WordPress plugin.

That plugin is available to download from the usual WP plugin repository through the admin panel and should install within a couple of clicks if your permissions are set correctly on your web server.

So it’ll be no surprise that I have adopted yoURLs as my tinyURL system. It also automatically tweets a link (short of cause) to a blog post I’ve just published with a little messing around (instruction included with plugin).

So hopefully I can walk down the street in peace now?

Apps customers need to manage their domain, and click Organisation & Users, Services, and finally turn the app on. Read and agree to the terms and you’re ready to go! You will automatically generate a circle for all your apps users in plus too.

Google are working on a tool to allow people like me who have a G+ account using their gmail account to be migrated to their apps account. No idea when this will arrive though.

For those that don’t know, google plus is a Facebook / Twitter / Linkedin hybrid service. It is in my opinion the only platform able to topple the three rivals. Every part of it allows you to give granular permissions to different groups (circles) of people, it allows you to follow celebrities and only show your boss a limited amount of info.

More info on google+ for google apps is available on this google blog…

There is however just one issue.  The Google+ iPhone / iPad / iPod app doesn’t like google apps accounts at the moment.  It asks you to register with an invite.  Mobile browsing works fine however.

I thought I’d expand on my earlier post about twittering and talk a bit more about my twitpic replacement. I’ll probably talk about my short URL service at some point too. I’ve only recently started tweeting. I’m still not sure if I’ll be doing it for very long with only a handful of followers, but I’ve started never the less.

After following a few of the bigger twitter names (@rickygervais, @Lord_Sugar and of cause @stephenfry) I noticed they would often upload a picture to attach to their tweets. They mainly used services such as lockerz, twitter own image host (in partnership with PhotoBucket) and Twitpic. But when I looked into it, a lot of these image hosting services took the copyright of the image when you uploaded it. Or at least granted themselves rights to sell the image. Those that don’t do it now, may well do it tomorrow, because many of these companies change their T&Cs with little or no warning.

So what if I took a photo of a news worthy event tomorrow and quickly tweeted it? Something along the lines of last weeks picture of Gaddaffi perhaps (I know it’s very unlikely, and I personally wouldn’t take a picture of a dead or dying individual even if they were a tyrant)? If I’d uploaded that to twitpic, they would happily sell the right to use the image to Sky news, the BBC, NBC and all the others. Nice little earner for sticking some hard drives in ‘the cloud’.

No, if I was going to upload content, it needed to remain mine.

Whenever a new service or website hits the public, someone usually makes a clone (sometimes slightly improved) script which you can download for free under the GPL licence, or for a small fee. Bang it on your web server and you’re good to go. Admittedly, you don’t have the latest buzz word name, or a ten million pound backer, but with as little as £25 a year, you’ve got the technology.

I found a fantastic plugin for WordPress called Twitter Image Host. With only two clicks I’ve enabled my blog to host my twitter images, and it really does work straight out of the box. The admin page only has a couple of options, resize image and an override URL (I’ll come back to this).

The only other requirement is that twitter grants you permission for your app (your website) to interact with the twitter servers. This is is achieved by filling out a form with a few bits of information. An app name, description, and your web address. They then give you an OAuth key and an OAuth secret which your twitter image host plugin used to authenticate with twitter.

Once you’ve jumped through those couple of hoops you’re ready to go.  You can then set your favourite twitter app (I generally use twitter for iPhone which confusingly used to be called tweetie2) to use your image host as the default.  So I’ve popped in the address which shows up in the settings page of Twitter Image Host on my WordPress install and off I go.  The address has a secret key in it to ensure that only the people you want to use the host, can.

That final option I mentioned was to rewrite the base URL. As mentioned in my last post, I’ve bought the snappy domain admw.eu. It’s the shortest I could find which still identified me, and I could afford (three letter domains fetch a premium). However at a mere £2.99 plus tax for the first year, it’s almost not worth mentioning the cost.  I popped my short domain in the Override URL prefix field within the Twitter Image Host settings.

I have pointed admw.eu at the same virtual host on my web server. If you follow that link, you’ll be brought straight back to adamwelch.co.uk. Why go to the bother, or expence? Well if I stuck with my original domain, my twitter image plugin would return the result adamwelch.co.uk/dyyma but because I have pointed my short domain straight back here, we can use the link admw.eu/dyyma saving me eight characters in my tweet, or to look at it another way; 5%!

The last thing to mention is the fantasic WPtouch plugin from bravenewcode.com.  The plugin detects that the viewer is browsing on a mobile device (Android, Blackberry, iPhone, Palm Pre etc.) and changes the theme to a mobile friendly version.  The free version works very well (as I’m sure the ‘Pro’ version would) at displaying my own twitter images in a mobile friendly way.

Here are a few of my latest twitter pics…

So why not ‘follow me‘ and see how it all works?

I’ve been working really hard over the last few days on this site. If anyone has visited over the last few days, you won’t have noticed any difference, but work has been going on behind scenes.

I’ve started twittering to take advantage of some of the things I’ve developed on my new site. I’m quite proud of two things in particular.

1. I’ve bought another new domain; admw.eu is my new super short domain, I am using it to host my own twitter pics, just like twitpic or yfrog. The difference is that the copyright stays with me, as does the traffic. So if I end up taking an image that gets broadcast around the globe, I can make the money from it!

2. I’m using my domain adamw.eu (my next shortest domain) to create a url shortening service. Using the url shortening system yoURLs, I can make this posts URL to adamw.eu/i from adamwelch.co.uk/2011/10/twittering. Clever eh and really useful in tweets and facebook status’?

It’s all very geeky, but I’m a geek and a proud geek at that! Oh, and this post should be tweeted within the next few minutes on my twitter account @AW_101

I’ve decided to try good old WordPress once more. I found a website created in WP with one of these lovely grid themes. It looked fantastic, and I hope I can make mine look pretty good too.

I did try google sites, I think I gave it a good shot but there was one issue which I couldn’t get round. When you post a blog (sorry “announcement”), the RSS feed always shows your full email address. Great for spammers, rubbish for me.  I searched high and low, but that’s the way it is say google.

I’ll still be using google for all my email needs, and it’s currently fullfilling all my document needs, but sadly it lacked in the website field.

WordPress is fantastic, it’s list of plugins allow people to create so much more than a blog. I’m going to archive some of the older more interesting stuff here, but throw most if it away because it was rubbish!

I will try as always to create something every month.  I might also start popping up a link to a website or something every so often.  I am also thinking about the possibility of tweeting.  People tell me it’s the future of social media, news gathering and other stuff too.  I am yet to be convinced.

One thing I have done recently is register a few more domains.  I quite like collecting domains based around my name, and at two or three quid per year, why the hell not?  I now own AdamWelch.Co.Uk, AdamWelch.Com, ADWelch.Co.Uk, AdamW.Co.Uk and AdamW.Eu.  The latter of which I am using as a short URL server for facebook and (possibly) twitter.  The service also allows me to automate a ‘tweet’ in the event of a blog post here.

After being dead against social networking site in recent years, I have joined facebook and I’m on Google+ too (although I’m still waiting for google to pull their finger out and get plus working for google apps rather than normal google accounts).  I’ve also installed a plugin here so you can easily share my useless ramblings.  So why not pick the icon of your favourite site below, and share me with all your friends?

Whether any of this is going to motivate me to update more, is another matter!

I was pleased as punch recently to have recieved my copy of ‘COMM’ by The Tangent through the front door. All of the albums released by the band been fantastic, the sixth studio album however holds a special little place in my heart.

Track four “The Tech Support Guy” tells the story of a typical day in the life of me! Although there are undoubtably harder jobs in the world, the song tries to explain how IT support are often thought to be the scourge of any organisation, when we’re all just men and women trying to do a good job. Have you ever rung your technical support department to congratulate them that everything is working perfectly? I bet you haven’t.

Why not go buy the track on Amazon or iTunes? Even better, toddle over to thetangent.org and buy the CD direct. I *will* love you forever.

Thanks

The only other post which ever got any recognition on my old e107 website was the rizla vending machine issue. This is a cut and paste from the old site…

I frequent a forum which amongst other things, has a section dedicated to free items (or very cheap) that people have found out there on the internet. Someone there pointed me in the direction of the Rizla website, the cigarette paper people. They were running a ‘pass the parcel’ comp. You could fill out the form, with the usual details, and unwrap three layers from the parcel. On my second layer, it said ‘Congratulations, you have won… A Vending Machine’

Now this all happened a while ago (May 6th), and in many ways I had forgotten all about it. On Monday I got a card from a courier through the door. Its at this point you start the whole, ‘we only deliver between 9 and 5 weekdays’ but that’s when I work too, so how the hell can I be in the house! They won’t redirect it to work, and if i don’t get it in three days, they will return it to the sender. Luckily, there depot is close to where a colleague of mine passes once a week. So this morning he picked it up and brought it in. Cheers Paul.

Addressed to Mr Adam, this thing is a bit bigger than I expected, and a lot heavier (16kg). So in fits of girly giggles, I opened the brown paper, and bubble wrap wrapping. I was ecstatic to find a pound in the dispensing / refund slot, and promptly put it straight back in (for two packets of king sized red), so I could open one of the draws. Rather disappointingly, there is no stock inside. So if I want to bolt it on the side of my house, and sell the the public, I will have to buy some packets.

It was at this point, after putting the pound inside, that I realised I haven’t seen a key, to open it up. There seems to be no key what so ever. So I decided to pop in a fifty pence piece (for two packets of normal sized green) to check that shoot. Firstly, yet again, there is no stock inside, but equally, no key in the draw.

So this vending machine, so far, is a money eating machine, and nothing else. I can’t even mount it on a wall without the key!

I have been on the rizla website again, to contact someone there. I filled out the feedback form, as there doesn’t seem to be an email address. Here is what I said…

Hello. I recently won one of the prizes in the pass the parcel comp. I won a vending machine.

I have received the machine this morning, all 16 kilos of it! It’s great, thank you very much (although it’s clearly second hand), and the pound floating around the inside (which after turning the machine upside down popped out) is a lovely bonus.

I was a little upset to find out that there is no stock inside. Nothing to vend.

However, the biggest problem (and the bit I really want you to read) is that I have no key to access the inside of the machine. I can’t fill it with your stock and place it in a public place to start my new business without that key!

The only clue I have to the key number is **** written on the back of the machine in marker pen.

Please help me. The machine is nothing but a large heavy money eating box without a key. I have already lost £1.50 inside!

Myself and other colleagues are currently trying a toilet paper tube method to break in (something we found on the internet), although we’re clearly not accomplished thieves.

I do hope you can help.

Mr Adam (which oddly the vending machine was addressed too)

PS. Could you change your feedback form to 18-25 (not 24) years old. 25-34 makes me feel very old.

I got a prompt auto-reply saying…

Dear Roller

Thank you very much for your feedback. We read all the messages we receive regarding our products and website.

However, if you have feedback that requires a response please email urgent@rizla.co.uk, and we’ll endeavour to get back to you as quickly as we can.

As always, keep on rollin’,

Rizla+.

So I immediately sent the original message again to the urgent address.

Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to break in as yet.

I’ll update as news comes in…

–> Update | Thursday 15 Jun : 11:17

Well after 24 hours, I’ve not had any reply from rizla+. After a few hours stuffing toilet rolls tubes in the lock, we still haven’t been able to gain access. We moved on to pliers and screwdrivers, but all that’s been achieved are a few more scratches.

I am going to start looking into phone numbers and addresses for rizla+, and try to contact them that way. So if anyone has any other contact details, or info on how to get them, please, please get in touch.

–> Update | Thursday 15 Jun : 11:23

Right. never noticed this at first, but there is a ‘About Us’ page, which contains the office address…

Rizla UK Limited is a wholly owned subsidiary of Imperial Tobacco Ltd. Registered in England and Wales.

Registered office:

So now its onto 192 (or which ever 118 service) to find a phone number…

–> Update | Friday 16 Jun : 10:29

You know, this is really getting to me now. Yesterday afternoon, I tried to ring Rizla+ on a few occations. I found their number via 192.com. Every time I ring (tried once more this morning) it just rings and rings and rings.

I decided that it might be a good idea to fax them instead. So I created a fax using one of the good old Word templates (rizla_fax). But the fax returned an error, so I rang the fax number, and it does exactly the same, just rings.

I have confirmed the UK Rizla+ address by doing a whois search on rizla.co.uk.

Can anyone help me get my key??

–> Update | Friday 16 Jun : 18:37

Right, got some good news.

I got hold of the number for Imperial Tobacco, who makes rizlas. The receptionist put my through to Rizla+ marketing. I had a chat with a lady (didn’t get her name) who said she was in charge of sending out the smaller prizes, but the woman who did the ‘bigger prizes’ was in some head honcho meeting and wouldn’t be out until early afternoon. She took my details and said someone would ring me back.

I am an impatient person sometimes. It got to four o’clock and I haven’t been called. I rang IT again and have managed to get through to the lady that sent me the machine. The lovely Amanda should be ringing me back on Monday to arrange delivery of a key. Unfortunately (for her) she had left the office phone forwarding to her mobile, so I caught her at home.

She tells me that there should have been a plastic bag attached to the back of the machine which contained the key. Now it definitely wasn’t there. Although I did unpack it in a hurry, I double checked all the packaging for extras.

Amanda told me that it is in fact completely new, but its ‘retro’. This explains that the prices are a little bit cheap for today’s rizla+ prices, but less so, the scratches and the pound coin. I suppose they could employ someone to bounce it down a hill, but it seems unlikely. I also brought up the question about the lack of stock. She said unfortunately, that’s normal. When I speak to her on Monday, I am going to see if I can wangle some stock for free, as compensation. A couple of boxes can’t cost IT very much money, surely. I am after all promoting her product (I made sure I said promoting rather than advertising, but I am unsure if papers come under the cigarette advertising laws)!

She did point out that there is currently one selling on ebay. As I type it has only had one bid, but it’s a bid of £130. So all in all, I can’t complain! Its nice to see what it looks like [link=http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6289443076&indexURL=0#ebayphotohosting]inside[/link] though!

Oh, I did ask one other thing… “I was just wondering, is there a no smoking policy in your office?” She sounded slightly confused, but simply replied “Not yet”!

–> Update | Monday 19 Jun : 16:03

Ok, so far today Amanda hasn’t been in touch. I have been waiting by my phone to hear the super fury animals sing “I’ve got a mobile phone, wherever I lay my phone (that’s my home)” but it hasn’t rung all day.

Its got to four o’clock so I have rung up Amanda, but it went through to voice mail. AARRGGHH!! I left a polite message asking her to ring me back. I really thought I might get this sorted today.

–> Update | Tuesday 20 Jun : 09:31

I’ve just had a phone call from someone at Imperial Tobacco in Nottingham. I didn’t catch the ladies name, as she spoke a little fast. Anyway, she assures me that there should have been a packing slip on the side of the package. Now it wasn’t there. I have no packing slip. She asked me to check the packaging. I wish I’d thought of that! On the third time, of insisting there is nothing there, she said they have no spare keys, and will have to see if they can get one cut. She wants to speak to a manager and ring me back. As usual… more as it comes in.

–> Mega Update | Tuesday 20 Jun : 14:19

Right, things move fast in the world of Marketing. I have had two phone calls in the last hour. One from the Nottingham lady who says she has found a key, and she will place it in a jiffy bag, hopefully to be delivered to me tomorrow. I can’t wait!

I also had another phone call from the lovely Amanda (who apparently had a good weekend) to confirm that I will be contacted by someone else about the key. I said they had already, and thanks for all the help.

It was at this point I felt it necessary to mention about this little story. “I have a little website where I comment on things in the news, or in my life. The thing is, a couple of other websites have linked to me, and I’ve had a few thousand hits over the weekend” I was some what taken aback when she said “I know, and you’ve quoted me almost word for word” It seems the folk in the Imperial Tobacco offices, have raised a smile at my little adventure. It seems Amanda and her boss had a little discussion about it! Rather than threaten the lawyers on me, they thought they would like to send me a selection of papers to fill my machine up with! How fantastic is that? I’m sooo pleased.

So, I’m close, but no cigar (I’ve been waiting to say that for days now) but hopefully tomorrow, I’ll be in!

Thanks for all the comments. I will update this as soon as anything drops through my door. I’m so excited…

–> Update | Thursday 22 Jun : 09:49

Excellent news all. The post person kindly dropped a jiffy bag through my door this morning. Encased within, was a small sealed envelope, and wrapped within that, a compliments slip (signed by Liz) where I found the key. The packaging suggest they wanted to make sure I got this one!

So alls well that ends well. Thank you to Amanda and Liz at Imperial Tobacco, who have definitely gone the extra mile. I’m just waiting for my free samples to arrive now. Then my new business is up and running. I’m quite pleased I didn’t just win a rizla+ thong and sock set now!

–> Update | Saturday 24 Jun : 11:23

The postman woke me up this morning at about nine. He has a package too big for my letter box. Unfortunately, the package had royal mail tape all over it, saying ‘Found Damaged or Open, and officially resealed’. I do hope nothing has been taken.

I opened the box to find an assortment of rizlas as follows… 20 x Blue (sml), 20 x Blue (ks), 20 x Green (sml), 20 x Green (ks), 20 x Silver (sml) and 20 x Silver (ks) and a compiments slip (not signed). Excellent. So I can only assume that if the postie did steal anything, he must be a rizla red man.

So thats great, and I had just run out of post-it notes as well!