Posts in the Random category

I have multiple Twitter accounts, generally one for each of my projects. Although I want people to find those accounts organically, sometimes you can increase your Twitter accounts worth by following more people, who, in turn, follow you back.

It's a bit of a hack, or probably better described as playing the game, but not something I would do with my personal account. Spreading news of my brand/projects is important though, so I am willing to just follow larger numbers of people. If any real followers want to really interact with those accounts, they're likely (guaranteed?) to @ the releavant account in their message.

There is another case, where you might want to follow all, or most, of the accounts that a friend follows. Whichever case you're interested in, below is a script you can run in your browser and it will click follow for every account it finds.

javascript:$('.follow-button').each(function() { $(this).click(); });

This could be adapted to work on Facebook or any other social network. Google+'s use of circles, rather than lists, makes this harder to implement, but maybe that could be turned into an extension?

To make the process even easier, just drag this link to the bookmark bar in a modern browser, then all you have to do is click on the bookmark to follow everyone you can see.

Possibly one of the few killer features missing from Google+ is the ability to create vanity URLs. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and all the rest let others find you with fairly short URLs like http://twitter.com/cchana or http://linkedin.com/in/cchana

While quite a few people have commented on this, if you have a Google profile URL - mine is http://profiles.google.com/cchana - you can use that to send people directly to your Google+ profile.

Another option, and one I've adopted, is the use of your own domain to redirect users to wherever they need to go. By adding a '+' to the end of your domain - http://domain.com/+ - with the power of an apache redirect, you can take users straight to their Google+ page. I've found it far easier to find a few friends of mine who have that exact redirect in place than to go to Google+ and find them. Hopefully this is a temporary situation and Google open up vanity URLs for everyone.

If you'd like to do the same for yourself, feel free to use the code below:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
# Social Network redirects
Redirect 301 /+ http://profiles.google.com/cchana

Simply, the above just redirects you from http://domain.com/+ to my Google profile. This in turn, redirects to my Google+ profile. Not ideal, and not something new users seem to be able to do, but a good stop gap. If you don't have a friendly Google profile URL, you can always replace the URL with your Google+ profile.

I went to the extreme and replace the '+' with a '-', '*' or '^' takes you to Facebook, Flickr or Twitter respectively.

Much of the credit for this method of a friendly Google+ URL, must go to Boback Shahsafdari and Adrian Parr.

I had a blast this past Saturday. After taking my sweet time getting out of bed and out of the house, we made our way up to Liverpool at around 10.30am. I tested out the possibility of twittering with my mobile so that I could micro-blog throughout the day.

The first part of our journey was pretty easy, making a stop just before Birmingham. We didn't stop again until we were just 70 miles from Liverpool. The Roadchef services we visited was a little shit to say the least, but I really needed to stretch my legs. I checked in with a friend I was meeting at Anfield, and once I knew where he was, we made the rest of our journey. It wasn't too long after we left the motorway that we found ourselves looking at the peak of Anfield, now less than a mile away.

After parking a short walk from the stadium, we made our way up Anfield road and were soon outside Anfield.

The stadum is impressive, although a little smaller than I had imagined. From the outside anyway. Well, if I'm honest, it's a little smaller than I imagined inside, but when it's full, it feels absolutely formidable. I can only imagine the atmosphere on a Champions League night or in a game against a bitter rival.

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I admit it's not the most exciting hobby, but I do like to buy football (soccer) shirts. As well as defining my fashion sense during my college and university days (and a lot of my evenings), they provide a sense of history.

A lot of clubs might experience a short burst of success, be on the brink or dominate regularly and owning a shirt from that era is a nice way to recognize their achievements.

As a Liverpool fan, I'm almost duty bound to buy their home kit every two years. My fiancé and sister have one (courtesy of me) and I own around 15 shirts from other nations and teams.

Among them are kits for AS Roma, India, Brasil, Italy, Spain, PSG, Real Madrid and Barcelona.

One thing I have yet to do, and would love to, is buy kits with even more meaning. So far I have a Brasil kit which actually means quite a bit to me because of it's limited edition nature and features. It has the World Cup final venue from 2004 embroidered onto it. It also features a 5th star, but under the confederations badge, rather than on top like their post 2004 final shirts feature. Small details, but things I like.

Browsing Subside today, I noticed a collection of pre-named and numbered shirts on sale, with a few featuring real legends. Although a 1994 Italy kit with Baggio would be perfect, I've seen them for around £100, this one may also find it's way on to a desired list.

Both the shirt and player have aged extremely well and I am considering getting some of the poorer purchases out of my collection and investing in wonderful pieces like this.