Czajkowski

I’ve been rather busy lately and not had much time to myself, finally getting some me time. Between moving house and getting things back in order and been busy at work I’ve neglected a few bits and pieces. So some housekeeping is needed!

I’ve been working with JonathanD on freenode with Fossevents for the past few week and it’s taken some tweaking, yes the orange is staying but has been toned down a bit ( I was vetoed on brown).  I have to say that I’m well impressed with the uptake from so many different communities from around the world submitting events. There are many different events on there at present, from Geeknics, general meet ups to conferences it’s great.  We’ve had a lot of feedback, and RSS feeds and mapping facilities are coming along as soon as we can figure out some bits and pieces and maybe a plugin or two.

I’ve also been working on my own little pet project which went live and has seen some folks already sign up so I’m pleased with that. It does however clash with another event Bizcamp in Dublin on the same day at the same time in a different location so it does mean start up companies will miss out on hearing about how useful Open Source software is. Shame….

I was asked recently on channel about the links I post as I shorten them and I thought I’d explain a bit further.  Firstly I like to support an Irish service or product wherever and whenever.  I use pix.ie for my photos, Blacknight for my hosting and short.ie for my urls.

But shortie has a really nifty feature which is why I use it, well two actually, 1 I can personalise a url like www.short.ie/geeknic and secondly I can keep track of them and view the amounts of clicks it has received.This is called the public timeline and you can share it with folks. I just find it rather neat. And the majority of these services all use open source

Screenshot-short.ie - Laura Czajkowski's public links

I’ve also just had one of the most productive IRC meetings so far for our LoCo.  We changed the day around to mid week as we had been meting on a Sunday for the last few months and it was just harder and harder to get people due to  travels. So this evening a load more new people joined and took on board new tasks, which is awesome! We used to just meet up and have a drink on the 1st Thursday of the month, but we’ve now decided to try and have a short talk before hand and see how that goes.  This will give people a chance to hear about a new project they are working on and also people a chance to practice giving talks.

Every now and then I like to try something new and see what all the fuss is about, I am also more inclined to use something that is Irish as I do like to support my own. So when I see Irish companies offering new products and services I jump at the chance.

The guys over at Echolibre and Webstrong have come up with short.ie, which shorts long winded and annoying URL’s into something more pleasant to view. The main feature that I like though is that I can personalise the shortened URL like following link I can see or have an idea what I am linking to http://short.ie/echolibre-blog, because I’ve also created an account within the site I can also see my top 30 previously sho rted links which is called a public timeline

Why not give it a try and the lads are great for taking suggestions, it started off having the http:// in the shortening bar and they removed it once it was pointed out that was confusing, they are looking to intergrate it into twitter, so you can shorted and post direcly when you are logged in to your twitter account. Lots of great ideas and it’s great to see these kind of things happening.