Multiple Tweets Gradient, a photo by mkhmarketing on Flickr.

This happens automatically when I bookmark a link so long as I add a certain label to it.

To do this, I use two free websites, del.icio.us and Twitterfeed.

Del.icio.us is simply a bookmarking site that allows me to save bookmarks and attach labels. All links that I want to appear on Twitter get the label “aop”. (You can see all my aop links here.) The most important del.icio.us feature from this point of view is that you can retrieve these bookmark lists in RSS format (e.g., this RSS feed for my aop links).

Twitterfeed posts RSS feeds to Twitter, so all you need to do is to tell it the address of your del.icio.us RSS feed and determine the posting frequency etc.

Del.icio.us and Twitterfeed work really well together, and it’s my impression that many of my Twitter followers really appreciate the links I’m posting.

archive_w_7295, a photo by Aureusbay on Flickr.

I have now partly solved this problem on my Arc of Prosperity blog by installing a WordPress plugin called Tweetily.

Tweetily will randomly select a post and tweet it automatically (I’ve set it to do this every 12 ± 2 hours).

I wasn’t sure what the reaction was going to be, but several of my “from the archives” posts have been retweeted and traffic has gone up significantly, so I think it’s been worthwhile in this case.

Scotsman Hotel, a photo by buhny on Flickr.

It’s clear that traditional journalism is in danger. However, I’m not really sure that the solution consists of paywalls, fundraisers, intrusive ads etc.

The things is that in the “old” days (about ten years ago), I spent something like £1 a day on buying newspapers (slightly less on workdays and slightly more on Sundays).

However, the advent of blogs and free newspaper websites has changed my behaviour — instead of reading all of one newspaper, I’m now reading 5% of 20.

The money I can spend on reading news hasn’t gone up, so there’s no way I can spend anything near £1 a day for news. On the other hand, if I had to pay 5p per article or blog posting, I probably wouldn’t spend much more than I used to, and everybody would be happy.

The problem is how to do it. I’m not going to set up subscriptions with direct debits or credit card details separately for the 50-100 news sites that I occasionally visit.

The only solution I can think of is a way for newspapers and quality blogs everywhere to create a payment system together, whereby reading a news article triggers a payment from the reader to the writer of 5p or so. The system would then add up all the small payments and send the reader a monthly bill.

However, it isn’t a perfect solution. Many websites would remain outwith this system (most small blogs and the BBC spring to mind), and there will always be a temptation for users to go for the free websites.

En el Desierto – Flickr NO SE VENDE, a photo by Rocorocks on Flickr.

(I always use this in conjunction with Donncha Ó Caoimh’s “Blog This To Draft” to prevent it from getting published immediately.)

However, Flickr’s standard WordPress code isn’t very good. It encapsulates the whole thing in <div>s, which means that WordPress cannot work out that it’s an image, which leads to all sorts of problems when you’re trying to pull out the first chunk of text from a posting, for instance in an RSS feed.

However, if you know what you’re doing, it’s quite easy to change. You need to go to your Flickr settings, and then click on the “Sharing & Extending” tab.

You should now see your blog (if it isn’t there, add it by clicking on “More sites” and following the instructions).

Now click on the “edit” button next to the name of your blog, and click on “select a blog layout”.

Now pick one of the layouts by clicking on it, and then choose “customize”.

This should display some HTML code such as this (I’ve added some white-space):

<div style="float: right; width: 240px;
    margin: 0 0 10px 10px; padding: 0;
    font-size: 0.8em; line-height: 1.6em;">
  <a href="{photo_url}" title="{photo_title}">
    <img src="{photo_src_m}" alt="{photo_title}
      by {uploader_name}" />
  </a><br/>
  <span style="margin: 0;">
    <a href="{photo_url}">{photo_title}</a>,
    a photo by <a href="{uploader_profile}">
      {uploader_name}</a>
    on Flickr.
  </span>
</div>{description}
<br clear="all" />

Now change it to use WordPress’s [caption] syntax, e.g.:

[caption align="alignright" width="240px"]
  <a href="{photo_url}">
    <img src="{photo_src_m}" alt="{photo_title}"
      width="240px" class="size-thumbnail" />
  </a>
  <a href="{photo_url}">{photo_title}</a>,
  a photo by
  <a href="{uploader_profile}">{uploader_name}</a>
  on Flickr.
[/caption]{description}

Now click “preview”. This will look dreadful, because this is WordPress code, not HTML, but just click on “save this layout” anyway.

You should now be able to use the “share” button on Flickr to generate pretty WordPress posts.

When I created my independence blog, Arc of Prosperity, I decided I would at first publish relevant posts on both blogs.

However, it’s not ideal that there isn’t a primary location for each post. For instance, it means comments on the same story aren’t always made in the same place.

I’ve therefore decided to put my blog postings about Scottish independence exclusively on Arc of Prosperity from now until the referendum.

I’ll post appetisers here, but you’ll be required to follow a link to read the full story.

Most of the people I follow on Twitter tweet in English, and so do I most of the time.

However, I often retweet stuff written in other languages, and I do also from time to time tweet in Danish and occasionally Spanish myself. This shouldn’t cause any issues for those of my followers who know the same languages as me, but if you only speak English, it must be a tad annoying to see your Twitter stream filling up with gibberish.

In theory I could set up separate Twitter accounts for all the languages I’m likely to tweet in, but that would be a complete mess. Not only would I need to flit back and forwards from one account to another, but it would appear that I had fewer followers than I do, and many people would only follow one of my language personas, even if they would be capable of following more.

I think Twitter should consider adding languages to the user interface, even if it would make it slightly more complex. This would involve adding language capabilities to the user profiles (allowing you to list the languages you can read) and tagging each tweet with a language (presumably everybody would have a default tweeting language). Twitter would then hide tweets written in languages that you cannot read.

I think this would really make life easier for the multilingual twitterers out there.

I’m not entirely sure what to conclude. Politics (top, red) has obviously been my favourite topic ever since the beginning of this blog. However, most other topics seem to come and go. Linguistics (second from top, orange) is probably the most stable of the other topics, but there have been several months without any mention of it. Most other topics disappear for many months at a time.

I guess the only thing that’s safe to conclude is that the Widmann Blog contains a bit of politics and a lot of everything else.

I expected the results would show that I’ve been using languages other than English less and less.

Here are the results (English [en] is the blue bit at the top; Danish [da] is the red bit underneath):

It was somewhat surprised when I saw the graph: Although Danish was used more for the first year or so, there haven’t been any major changes over the past couple of years (last month was 100% English, but that was clearly an exception).

I still have a niggling suspicion that I don’t use Danish as often as I used to, however. Possibly it’s to do with the length of blog postings – I have a feeling that I don’t write many long ones in Danish any more. I might try and investigate that another time.

I have just created a website for the branch.

It’s nothing special, just a nice little site based on WordPress.

I’ve decided to make a blog dedicated to Scottish Independence. It’s called the Arc of Prosperity, and you can find it at arcofprosperity.org.

To quote from the About page:

On the 11th of August 2006, Alex Salmond said:

Scotland can change to a better future and be part of northern Europe’s arc of prosperity. We have three countries ­ Ireland to our west, Iceland to our north and Norway to our east – all in the top six wealthiest countries in the world. In contrast devolved Scotland is in 18th place. We can join that arc of prosperity.

I spent the first 30 years of my life in Denmark, but ten years ago I moved to Scotland, and I often wonder about the differences between Scotland and Denmark. I strongly felt that Salmond was absolutely right in making that comparison, although I don’t really understand why he didn’t include Denmark in the arc.

I’ve been blogging for years at The Widmann Blog, but when Alex Salmond announced that the Independence referendum would take place in the autumn of 2014, I decided to create a new blog dedicated to Scottish Independence, and when I was looking for a name, I decided on the Arc of Prosperity to show that I’m approaching Scottish Independence from a Danish perspective.

At the moment, it only contains copies of postings from this blog, but that might change it the future, so please bookmark it, too!