Just started testing out Elgg and getting involved in the Elgg forums. Have already started writing some documentation as what is there already seems a bit thin in places. Unfortunately this means I’ve started getting private messages through Elgg asking complicated php questions about Elgg installation and customisation which I have no idea about – I’ve only been doing it for a week!

The other day I commented on someone elses post in the Running Elgg community and chose to ‘watch’ that topic. Then in my inbox I received the following message:

For a start, Elgg should know that I am Beth Granter. Secondly, I don’t need to be sent the message that I wrote myself. Thirdly, it wasn’t MY blog post, it was by someone called Emma.

Note to self – fix this in our own installation!

*Edit* I just went back to Elgg to tell the other people who messaged me that I don’t know how to help and /messages/ has given me a 404 error!

If you click the RSS feed link in Last.FM, instead of seeing the messy-looking xml  file you usually get, you get this lovely friendly message and explanation:

I do like the pink RSS icon in the corner… and below this was a nice human-readable list of items which are in the RSS feed (not in xml – just written out in plain English).

I can’t figure out how to put this in an RSS feed I create though – as I can’t see it in the file itself!  I’ll google that up next week.

All this talk of RSS is due to the fact that I just created not only MY first RSS file, but the University of Sussex’s first actual proper podcast (that we’re aware of anyway).  People had been calling them podcasts because the MP3 files were available online, but you couldn’t actually subscribe to them until yesterday.  You can now subscribe to a podcast of Sussex Lectures.

Last.fm has a feature for Facebook where each of your charts (Top Weekly Artists/ Top Tracks Overall etc.) has a ‘Paste your taste’ dropdown box where you can copy an ordered list of your favourite music, ready to be pasted in to your Facebook profile ‘Music’ section.

This is fine as long as that information doesn’t change very often, but it’d be a right hassle to repeat this procedure every few days. What a shame there is no option for this to be automatically updated in Facebook. I hope Last.FM and Facebook are in talks…

I know you can have the Last.FM widget on your Facebook profile, but that means if people are searching for fans of a certain band by clicking that band name in the Music section of a Facebook profile, having that band in your Last.FM widget won’t bring you up in search results. You have to have those bands listed actually in the Music section of your default profile. And those have to be manually written in, so this ‘Paste your taste’ option seems to be the best we can hope for at the moment.

Steve Ganz discovered that facebook is ageist. It appears that once you hit 30 the option to be looking for ‘whatever i can get’ or ‘Random play’ disappear! And if you were already on facebook with those selected and turn 30, it automatically changes your settings to just ‘Friendship’ without notifying you. Stunning. Surely this is a violation of privacy in the sense that it alters the way you have chosen to represent yourself? If you are not there for friendship and want to be known as a sleazy pervert who only wants Random play and definately no friends, wouldn’t you be upset to be mis-represented as a harmless friendly person?

Anyone know the reasons for Facebook’s thinking behind this?