Thoughts.

In short: Break the habit of using cryptic short urls and then adding some context to them manually. Instead, use a shortened version of your [brand] name as your domain, then write each "URL alias" in the style of a short facebook status update. For example: If you're tweeting, you can then use the rest of the 140 characters much more efficiently - or not at all.

The Background

A few months ago, I decided to buy a domain name in Greece. Now, I love Greece, but that isn't why I did it. I dit it because I wanted my own, private, URL shortening service: acree.gr. It was primarily an excuse to geek out, but also served as a way to separate myself from millions of other tweeters - my tweets with link would always contain personalized short URLs.

A few days ago, I got around to building it. Sure, I could have bought it, but I wanted the challenge of maintaining it and hosting it too. To make a short story shorter, it is now live. I used it for real this morning, in this tweet. To save you a click, here it is:



After I had written it, I realized that I had saved myself a few characters by using a facebook style status update as the URL. Sure, that is handy, but there is another benefit too. Whenever anyone shares that link, your opinion/fact will be shared immediately, without requiring any additional context or anyone to click on anything. You are helping to ensure your voice does not morph as it is shared. If you are a brand or celebrity, that is pretty powerful. I'm sure someone has done this before, but I haven't seen it. In effect, acree.gr isn't a URL shortening service, it has become my personal Tweet Shortening Service.

Tweet Shortening in Action

The link to this page is http://acree.gr/invented-tweet-shortening. It might be a bit longer than the average bit.ly link, but that URL is working much harder than most. It is not just a reference that goes alongside some context, it IS the context. That can be the tweet on its own. For example, I could tweet about this blog post as follows:
But instead, I think I'll just tweet:
Pompous? Definitely. Inaccurate? Maybe. Concise? Yes. Intriguing? I hope so. Effective? We'll see. (For the record, I don't really believe I've invented anything)

How to start get your own Tweet Shortening Service

In the off chance you want to join in, you can follow these steps:

The problems with Tweet Shortening

There is one main reason why Tweet Shortening might not work: people will habitually (even automatically) shorten a URL and then manually add context to the cryptic link they've just produced. It is what they have been doing for months/years. Some apps even do it for you (TweetDeck, for example). In the process of this habitual/automatic shortening, the context rich URL will be lost. For example, if you enter the context-rich link to this post (http://acree.gr/invented-tweet-shortening) in TweetDeck, it auto-converts it to http://bit.ly/fxvEXf. Damage done. Thankfully, you can disable this otherwise useful feature. Those smart folks at TweetDeck were also kind enough to make it easy to toggle on and off on a per-link basis.

That's it! I'm enjoying messing around with short tweets, I hope you do too.

UPDATE: I have 50 Rockmelt invites, on a first come, first served basis. Click here for your invite! Sorry, all the invites were used in only 45 minutes...

It's been almost 3 whole days since I got hold of RockMelt, a new social media web browser. It has been fun playing with the new features, and I've learnt a few tricks that have made it more fun. I thought I'd share them here. This isn't a complete list, please let me know if you want to contribute your own tip.

Learn the lingo, get an edge

An "edge" is a simply a toolbar that appears at the edge of the screen. RockMelt has two edges out of the box, the friend edge (on the left) and the app edge (on the right).

The friend edge will show you either your friends that are online, or your favorites (more on that later). The app edge integrates with Facebook and other apps to shows you feeds (perhaps it should be called the feed edge?). Common feeds to have here are your Facebook feed, your Facebook notifications and your Twitter stream. You can also consume other feeds such as blogs or news. Read on for a easy way to choose your feeds.

Side note: Graph geeks amongst you may well have though an edge was a relationship between two friends - but no, in RockMelt, it's just a toolbar.

Share a link with a friend, in a couple of clicks

Like a page you're looking at? Want to share it with someone in particular? That's pretty easy.

Drag and drop the URL from the address bar (using the globe or the padlock ) onto your friend in the friend edge on the left. Then choose one of the options:



Type your own message, and your done!

Open search results in way that suits you

Take a close look at the search results pane, and you'll see two features you may find useful:
I also use the arrow keys to quickly preview each result, then the enter key to go there.

Let RockMelt feed you

After a little while, RockMelt can start suggesting new feeds for you to consume. Use the browser for a few days, then use the the "Add Feeds" button on the app edge (on the right) to have RockMelt automatically suggest feeds for sites you've been using. Click the star next to a feed to add it to the app edge.

Get friendly with the address bar

You can get to your friend's Facebook profile pages easily in RockMelt. Just type their name into the address bar, click on the suggestion, then click on your friend's profile image that appears.

Pick favorites

Chances are you've got a lot of friends. Cut down the noise and choose some favorites. The easiest way is to add favorites is to:

Business up front, party in the back

Being so connected to your friends is great, but what if you need to focus on your work and not get distracted? Use the Ctrl-Shift-Space key combo to take the edges off your RockMelt. Think of it as a modern-day Boss Key. If you want to hide just one of the edges you can use the Ctrl-Shift-LeftArrow and Ctrl-Shift-RightArrow to control your "friend edge" and your "app edge" respectively. The same key combo will bring them back.

Use your invites, wisely

RockMelt seems to give out an invite or two every couple of days (so far!) It also very cleverly suggests friends that have requested an invite, so hook a friend up, send them an invite - you're sure to get more. Use the "Open Invites" button to send invites to the friends who you know really want one.

Note: The opinions expressed in this post (and all others) are my own and are not necessarily representative of those of AKQA, HealthPartners or any party involved in virtuwell. Please read this press release for more information.

Today is a good day. This morning, at around 7am PST, HealthPartners launched an application called virtuwell. It was created in partnership with AKQA (the company I work for) over the last 15 months or so.

The premise of the application is simple. If you or your kids are feeling sick and you are short of time, or perhaps if you don't have insurance, then virtuwell may be for you. It offers online diagnosis and treatment (including prescriptions) at a very affordable cost - it may even be covered by your health plan.

As Technical Architect, virtuwell was definitely the most challenging project of my career. We were responsible for developing the entire application, and had to meet the strict security and quality requirements that come hand in hand with a healthcare app without sacrificing a clean, friendly user interface. On top of that, I've had to master an entirely new technology stack. We have all learned a lot.

As a recent arrival in the USA, I have barely began to understand the challenges facing the health system here, but I am proud to have been part of a passionate and dedicated team that has made strides towards making healthcare more accessible to all.

It is also my mother's birthday.

As I said earlier, today is a good day.

Right now I am getting to grips with the finer details of an Alfresco v3.1.1 installation. It has been fun*.

Today's quest was all about stopping the TinyMCE plugin that Alfresco uses from wrapping absolutely everything in a <p> tag. Usually I love <p> tags. Way more than I love <br>tags. But not all content entered through a CMS should be wrapped in them.

I found this bug report, which mentioned a rather drastic way of fixing it, but also gave some clues as to another, less invasive, way. The hunt was on. A few hours later (it would have been a few minutes if I had thought to clear my browser cache), I came up with the following:

(DISCLAIMER: The following changes will be lost if you upgrade/replace your Alfresco installation. But since this issue doesn't occur in any other version of Alfresco, that should be ok.)

Step 1: Open up <tomcat>/webapps/alfresco/scripts/ajax/xforms.js

Step 2: Find the definition of alfresco.constants.TINY_MCE_DEFAULT_SETTINGS (it is near the end) and change it to be:

alfresco.constants.TINY_MCE_DEFAULT_SETTINGS =
{
theme: "advanced",
mode: "exact",
plugins: alfresco.constants.TINY_MCE_DEFAULT_PLUGINS,
width: -1,
height: -1,
auto_resize: false,
force_p_newlines: false,
encoding: "UTF-8",
entity_encoding: "raw",
add_unload_trigger: false,
add_form_submit_trigger: false,
theme_advanced_toolbar_location: "top",
theme_advanced_toolbar_align: "left",
theme_advanced_buttons1: "",
theme_advanced_buttons2: "",
theme_advanced_buttons3: "",
urlconverter_callback: "alfresco_TinyMCE_urlconverter_callback",
file_browser_callback: "alfresco_TinyMCE_file_browser_callback",
forced_root_block: false,
force_br_newlines: true
};

Note the two last lines.

When you are done, all you need to do is clear your browser's cache, and go edit some web content in Alfresco. Anything you create from now on will no longer be wrapped in the usually wonderful <p> tags.

*This depends on your definition of fun.

One year on, I've just released a minor enhancement to the tiny open source project I created called FBConnectAuth - Facebook Connect Authentication for ASP.NET.

This release contains two enhancements:

//Note this is the "app id", not "api Key"
FBConnectAuthentication auth = new FBConnectAuthentication(appId,appSecret);
if (auth.Validate() != ValidationState.Valid)
{
    // The request does not contain the details
    // of a valid Facebook connect session.
    // You'll probably want to throw an error here.
}
else
{
    FBConnectSession fbSession = auth.GetSession();

    string userId = fbSession.UserID;
    string sessionKey = fbSession.SessionKey;

    //This is the Graph API access token
    //(available only when using the Graph API)
    string accessToken = fbSession.AccessToken;

    // The above values can now be used to communicate
    // with Facebook on behalf of your user,
    // perhaps using the Facebook Developer Toolkit

    // The expiry time and session secret is also available.
}

If you are interested, go take a look.

We recently came across a situation where we couldn't our Grails app was failing because it was trying to create a table with the name of 'Condition', which turns out to be a reserved word in MySQL... We worked around it by changing the name of the table to 'conditions' by using the Grails ORM DSL, but it turns out there is another way.

class Condition {
 String property1
 String property2
 ...

 static mapping = {
  table '`condition`'
  ...
 }
}

To be honest, I'm not sure why Grails and/or hibernate don't escape all table and column names by default (I'm sure there is a good reason) - there is an open JIRA issue in Grails around this very problem...

This kind of thing should be easy to find, but I couldn't hunt it down on google. So to save someone else some pain, here it is - the location of the %USERPROFILE% / home directory for the NT AUTHORITY\NetworkService user: