Developed initally on WordPress 2.3, it has successfully been tested on WordPress 2.7.1. Most of the other plugins out there either did this only in their “badge” or “widget” or where too full featured. This is a simple and quick plugin to get links in place to twitter people for the lazy blogger. Visit my plugin page, give it a try and let me know what you think.

An friend of mine who lives in China recently wrote to me and said “guess what.. the great firewall of China seems to be gone…” My friend advised that you can read anything you like. An example of this is the UK BBC news site, who a few months ago reported that their English site is available inside China for first time in a decade; but the point of interest is that the BBC Chinese site is also available for use within China.

A recent post on SlashDot quotes an IT professor saying: People are unwittingly trusting the information they find on Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading After reading this, I thought it was time to write about a something I found that backs this up. An anonymous user added information about Sacha Baron Cohen (known onscreen as Ali G.) to Wikipedia on November the 14th 2006.

Telstra announced yesterday that their ADSL 2+ (what’s with the plus?) upgrade has now been completed Australia wide. What does this give the average end user access to? The Telstra PR and discussion site explains: The ADSL2+ upgrade of 907 telephone exchanges serving 2.4 million homes and businesses announced in February is now complete. This means millions of additional Australian families, businesses, non-profit organisations and government agencies across every state and territory can now enjoy the benefits of high-speed broadband

Only 2 months ago I wrote that Gmail had hit 4GB, but it was still behind the main crowd (MSN, Yahoo, etc). Well in time for the new year, they have finally hit the 6GB (not 6GiB yet!) limit. This was initially picked up by a number of bloggers including WikiGiz and BBCentral. I’ve totally cutover to Gmail since they enabled IMAP and I figured out how to turn it on.

For a long time I used google maps over the local provider, WhereiS (a Telstra/Sensis product). Even though google maps had less local content, WhereiS was so 1999 in its web design that it was unusable. Basic dragging of the maps which is now a staple of so many online map providers, was one of the basic missing pieces of functionality. But recently they have updated their online maps, which can now be accessed as a Beta version.

Recently Gmail activated IMAP for selected accounts, and I appeared to not be one of them. However was it really for selected accounts or was it for ‘selected languages’?! Reading about gmail on digg led me to an un-dug comment (I gave him a thumbs up!) saying that for IMAP to appear your language in gmail had to be set to ‘English (US)’. So I gave it a try, as I had mine on ‘English (UK)’ for the spelling.

I’m messing around with the updated Snap Shots code. It enhances the links you see on this page with visual previews of the other sites{.snap_shots}, interactive excerpts of things like: Wikipedia articles{.snap_shots} IMDb titles{.snap_shots} Amazon products like the book I am currently reading{.snap_shots} inline videos RSS feeds{.Snap_Shot_RSS} from a site MP3s like this La Primavera track{.snap_shots} photos{.snap_shots} stock charts{.snap_shots} …you get the idea… They say the “Snap Shots” can bring you the information you need, without having to leave a site, while other times it lets you “look ahead,” before deciding if you want to follow a link or not.

I am coming back to earth with my posts, and thinking about Google. They are growing by acquiring technology and companies. They release new products like the Java/Linux based Android (Is linking to google news about Google considered irony?!). How long before Google exceed Microsoft? I remember when their shares where $100. Then months ago I was discussing with friends that $600 was an amazing price to reach. Then weeks ago was amazed that each share had grown from $600 to $670.

With my recent loss, I had thought about, and seen other people, decentralising data. Luckily I’ve already got an email and RSS feed backup in place. As soon as my Laptop was out of order, I jumped onto my pobox.com account and redirected email to Gmail. Gmail will keep my mail flow going for a week or two. Next I went over to Google reader and reset all my feeds. Previously I had exported all my subscribed Newsfire RSS subscriptions to OPML format, and imported it into google reader.