Geek Stuff

My company website refreshed

As part of an ongoing attempt to put my online world into some sort of order I have today refreshed the website for my company, Grit & Oyster Limited.

This website hadn’t been properly updated for quite a while. So it needed to be changed to reflect the current status of the business, given a more attractive look, and to be brought into line with current internet standards.

I also wanted to move it to WordPress as its platform for content management. This was not only to reflect the fact that a large part of the work I am doing at the moment is developing WordPress themes, but also to provide greater flexibility in publishing content and highlighting some of the projects I have been working on.

As a temporary measure I have used the same theme that I have used for update to my personal website I did a few weeks ago. This is a temporary measure as I intend to develop a specific theme for the company website when work on other projects allows me.

1st September 2010 18:59 0 Geek Stuff

Luton Liberal Democrats website refreshed

Not much blogging happening at the moment, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been idle. One of the things I have been working on is a refresh of the Luton Liberal Democrats website. A little late, but it needed redoing following the general election.

I admit that it doesn’t look very exciting, but I intend to add some photo galleries and there will be new content as we get closer to next year’s local elections. I also hope to get one or two more people involved in updating it so that it isn’t just reliant on me and we can get a bit more regularly changing content.

The website is based on WordPress and uses a special WordPress theme for Liberal Democrat websites that I have written. I will be blogging a bit more about that in the next few weeks.

The address is: www.lutonlibdems.org.uk

24th August 2010 16:52 2 Geek Stuff, Luton, Politics

My new personal website

This week I have been working on a redesign of my personal website at www.andystrange.org.uk.

This was a project that for a long time had badly needed doing and I am pleased to have finally sorted it. It will need a few tweaks here and there but I am happy with the result.

The idea of the site is an attempt to bring all my online activities together in one place.

The place where I will continue to blog will be here at ‘Strange Thoughts’ but I have a number of roles and responsibilities in my life and the people I meet will usually know me through one or other of them. If any of them were to Google me I wanted them to be able to find a place where they could quickly get a a rounded picture of who I am. I also wanted them to be able to easily access the other online places they might be looking for, whether it is this blog, Twitter, Luton Lib Dems, or my company website.

I hope the new design and content will achieve this. If you feel inclined, check it out and let me know what you think here.

6th August 2010 18:44 2 Geek Stuff

Luton South on Twitter

I’ve set up a list of the Twitter accounts of candidates and others involved in the general election campaign in the Luton South constituency.

http://twitter.com/andymstrange/luton-south

If you spot any I’ve missed you can suggest them by commenting to this post.

The Twitter hashtag for Luton South is #LutonS (taken from this list http://bit.ly/GE2010).

12th April 2010 08:50 1 Geek Stuff, Luton, Politics

Luton South is a key seat according to Twitter

Luton South will be a key seat in the general election if an analysis of the activity associated with it on Twitter is correct.

The people behind the political ‘tweet’ aggregator Tweetminster are conducting an experiment to see whether “activity on Twitter correlates to electoral success”. They explain their experiment like this;

“Our inspiration for this experiment comes from last year’s General Election in Japan, when a group of software engineers and PhD graduates from Tokyo University undertook a study analysing the correlation between ‘online buzz’ and election results. The aim of the study was to assess if word-of-mouth mentions of candidates could help to predict which ones would be successful. The study found that in a majority of constituencies the most mentioned candidate won the seat ….

We thought it would be interesting to run a similar experiment to the Japanese study in the UK using Twitter. From now until the election we will be tracking the most mentioned (i.e. posts and conversations about) constituencies and candidates on Twitter and using this data we will try to map the correlation between buzz, word-of-mouth and the eventual election results through a predictive model.”

In their initial analysis they have identified a number of key battlegrounds defined as seats where the difference between mentions of candidates is 20% or less. They have included Luton South as one of a handful of seats where there is “the narrowest margins between the various parties contesting them”. Is this an indication of how competitive the seat has become and how hard the parties are campaigning?

You can follow Liberal Democrat candidate Qurban Hussain on Twitter.

31st March 2010 14:44 0 Geek Stuff, Luton, Politics

Twitter

I have finally given in to something that I have been trying to avoid for a long time.

Unconvinced by certain evangalists that it was the solution to almost everything and with a contrary desire to avoid following the herd I thought I could stay away from it indefinately. I was naive. It’s powerful pull was too strong.

Yes, I have signed up to Twitter.

You can find me at: http://twitter.com/andymstrange

To be fair I can see the logic of the service and how it can play a useful role in my ongoing project to simplify my online life.

Still it did take a stern talking to – thanks Helen – for me to realise that I would have to bow to the inevitable. I’ve just now got to start joining it up to my other online services.

17th March 2010 20:09 0 Geek Stuff

Geek or nerd?

The description I have given this blog in an attempt to succinctly sum myself up is;

“The blog of Andy Strange; lutonian, liberal activist and occasional geek.”

The first two descriptive terms are understandable and accurate. But what of the third? I confess to having a moment of doubt. Am I really an occasional geek? Perhaps I am actually an occasional nerd? What is the difference between the two?

I consulted the internet in order to help me to define my terms.

Unsurprisingly the internet disagreed with itself. However, it did seem to agree that both terms are associated with people of high intelligence who have an intense interest and knowledge of a particular subject or field of study. It also agreed that this was accompanied with a lack of social skills. Please note that I qualify each term with ‘occasional’ when applying them to myself.

However, it does seem that the term ‘geek’ is more often associated with an interest and knowledge of technology, especially computer technology. Which is what I was intending to convey.

So that’s all right then.

I did rather like the definition of ‘geek’ given by the Urban Dictionary;

“The people you pick on in high school and wind up working for as an adult.”

Also I have learnt that, whether you are a geek or a nerd, the key things is not to be a ‘dork’!

8th March 2010 15:38 0 Geek Stuff

Liberal Democrat web colour palette

Late last year the national party launched a new Liberal Democrat style guide for literature in preparation for the coming general election. This introduced a new official colour palette. They also have revamped the national website with a design based on that style.

The new style has proved controversial in some quarters, but I have to confess that I rather like it.

However, like a lot of organisations which go through a corporate re-branding exercise the Party has failed to give proper consideration to the use of the style on the web. In particular the new colour palette, while specified in RGB and Pantone values, was not specified in the hexidecimal format commonly used within web code. Given that I have been working on creating websites to match the new style and needed to use that format I decided to translate the new colours myself.

In doing so I discovered that the national website does not stick strictly to the style guide! However, this is probably sensible as some of the colours don’t work so well when displayed on the screen. This being the case I then decided to create my own Lib Dem colour palette for use on websites.

In case others find it useful I’ve created a page which has details of both the direct translation from the style guide and the palette that I came up with. It can be found at the following link: