In the last 24 hours I’ve had 17 new people follow me on Twitter, without even twitting anything new. All the usernames of these people are of politicians, with a number after, e.g. denniskucinich4. They’re obviously being run by the same person but I don’t understand the point of them following me. Maybe it’s just to get me to look at their twitter account and hopefully subscribe to it, then whoever is managing the account can persuade that politician’s promoters to sponsor them. Anyway, it’s weird, and I hope I don’t get too many more from them.

Just noticed on the Last.FM friends page that when you hover over a friend in your friends list, the corner of the box (containing a particular friend’s profile picture) peels over and displays a trashcan. I mean, rubbish bin.

…to… …to…

Clicking on the person’s picture takes you to that person’s profile page. The trashcan makes me a bit nervous to click here though, since it only appears when you hover over a person, it might make you think that person would get deleted from your friend list if you click the person.

Mouse over the trashcan and it opens. Click the trashcan itself and you cancel the friendship.

Don’t worry LilDAISYcrow, I’m not going to delete you.

I really like how this interface makes it easy to delete people right from your friend list, without having to go to a separate page for that process, and I really like the corner of the box turning over, and the rubbish bin opening when you mouse over it. I might do something similar on my work project (SPLASH). But I would want to avoid making a rubbish bin appear when you hover over something which when clicked doesn’t actually trash anything.

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.