For a long time, I’ve been looking for a way to find postings that are filed under two or more categories in WordPress. It’s very easy to click on any of the categories in the column on the far left to find all blog postings within this category, but how do you find all blog postings about linguistics in Danish, or the blog postings I’ve written in English about Scottish politics?

I assumed there was no easy way to do it. I read the documentation I could find, I searched through lots of of WordPress plugins, but to no avail.

Today I then suddenly got the idea to see whether they had implemented it anyway, so I decided to try the different URLs that would make sense to me as a programmer.

My first instinct was to try a ‘+’ sign, and much to my surprise it actually worked!

For instance, category/fooddrink+es gives you food and drink in Spanish, linguistics+da gives you linguistics in Danish, and politics+en+scotland gives you Scottish politics in English.

You even seem to be able to get a feed, such as category/kids+linguistics/feed for the RSS feed for kids & linguistics.

The only problem seems to be that the generated heading is wrong – I’ll need to have a look at that to see whether it’s something I can fix.

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We had started getting an increasing number of nuisance calls, mainly recordings being played to us several times a day.

So on the 30th of November, I signed up for a free service to avoid nuisance calls, the Telephone Preference Service.

The website wrote that it could take up to 28 days to become effective, but we’ve hardly had any such calls for the past fortnight.

I strongly recommend signing up!

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Google+ has now finally been opened up to those of us using Google Apps-hosted email accounts (e.g., my private email address is on the bibulus.org domain, but it’s Gmail internally).

However, all is still not well.

First of all, there’s a big problem with duplicate accounts: I now have two Google+ accounts, but I really just want one; I’m being offered Google+ for my work account, too, which again I’d prefer to be included in my normal Google+ account. I feel Google have made a huge error by making an equivalence between Google-hosted email accounts and other Google accounts – people tend to have many email addresses, but just one Facebook account.

Secondly, I think it’s disastrous that there’s no posting API for Google+, which means that Twitter, WordPress and the like can’t post to Google+. It’s probably a feature rather than a bug (my guess is that Google are trying to prevent lots of annoying autogenerated contents), but it simply does not tally with the way I (and many others) use social media. When I have something to say, I typically write a blog posting in WordPress which then automatically posts a link to Twitter and Facebook. (Actually, one of the things that are annoying me about Facebook is that it’s hard (or impossible?) to integrate Facebook comments with the comments in WordPress.) I just can’t be bothered posting links manually to Google+, so the likely result is that I won’t post very much there, and people are advised to follow me on Twitter or Facebook instead.

Along the same lines, Google+ seems to force you into using Picasa; however, lots of us are happily using Flickr or whatever, and a lack of integration will just annoy us, it won’t make us use Picasa instead.

Google really need to sort out these issues soon. If they don’t, I fear Google+ won’t ever get close to kicking Facebook off the throne.

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I’ve used Gmail for Google Apps for both my private bibulus.org email and my corporate complexli.com one for a couple of years now.

I used to run them in separate tabs in Chrome, which worked really well without any interference between them.

However, last Thursday I received an email from Google announcing that they “recently transitioned [my] organization to the new infrastructure for Google Apps accounts, a change that makes over 60 additional Google applications like Google Places, Google Reader, Picasa Web Albums and AdWords accessible with Google Apps accounts.”.

At first, that sounds like a good thing, but a side effect seems to have been that I now cannot run both in separate tabs – they keep logging each other out.

As a result, I’m now accessing one email in Chrome and the other one in Firefox, which works OK, but I’m not sure Google’s intention was to force Google Apps users into using rival browsers!

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I’ve been on Google+ for a couple of days now, so I guess it’s time for a first review. So far I only have three contacts there, so it’s quite limited how much social networking I’ve actually done there, so my opinion of some of the features might change as I get more experience. Anyway, here are my initial comments:

• The fact that Google+ uses Google accounts is causing some problems. I have three email adresses: my work one, my private one, and a Gmail address I have because certain Google services need it; all three are actually run by Gmail. However, I was only able to get onto Google+ using my Gmail address, and once there, I seem to be unable to link to my other accounts. This means that if I’m reading my normal email, I need to log out and log on to my Gmail email to access Google+, and that makes it a real hassle. Google really need to sort out how to handle people like me who are using several Google accounts at the same time if they want Google+ to take off.
• The circles idea is brilliant (I actually thought of it myself last year but never did anything about it :-/), but it can be improved. For instance, circles can’t currently be nested AFAIK – I think it’d be useful to have big, easily comprehensible circles like “friends” and “work” that could then be subdivided into smaller circles. Of course you can make as many circles as you want at the moment, but you’ll then need to add every individual to many circles, which will become a bit of a hassle once you have 500 contacts in Google+.
• I guess I’m not alone in currently using Facebook for my social life and LinkedIn for my work. Google+ has the potential to take over from both, but it can only do that if the extend the circles to cover everything on the site, not just who can see your postings. For instance, I want to be able to have different profile photos depending on who sees it. Also, it needs to be guaranteed that everything that my friends post on my stream is invisible to my work contacts.
• Google+ seems to integrate only with Picasa (which makes sense given that both are part of Google), but I’m a Flickr user, and I don’t want to be forced into migrating to Picasa. To be honest, I think Google is going to be hit with some massive antitrust court cases in the US if Google+ takes off and they don’t integrate seamlessly with non-Google sites.
• I’m not sure I like the ‘+1′ idea. I’ve always complained that Facebook didn’t have a ‘dislike’ button to accompany the ‘like’ button, but I’m not sure that calling it ‘+1′ solves the problem. The thing is that if somebody says that their pet hamster has died a gruesome death, you want to have a button to press to express sympathy, and I’m not sure ‘+1′ encapsulates that…

In spite of all this, Google+ definitely looks promising, and I think Facebook should be very afraid.

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I read this in The Telegraph the other day:

On the rare occasions I have done my supermarket shop via computer, the milk and meat that arrived were already on their sell-by date. I felt cheated. One of the many thrills of being in a supermarket is that you can surreptitiously shove aside the sausages the store displays at the front of the cabinet to find the freshest produce at the back.

I couldn’t agree more. I always pick products from the back of the shelf, and the fact that it’s not in the shops’ interest to do the same when picking groceries for online shoppers makes me very reluctant to use internet shopping for products that can go off (although I hardly ever buy books, computers, trees or holidays offline these days).

I guess the fundamental problem is that a lot of us don’t trust supermarkets to act as critical shoppers in their own shops.

I wonder whether it’d be worth setting up a business to provide 3rd party internet shopping, i.e., the customers would order groceries online, and the website’s expert shoppers would then go into several physical shops to get the freshest produce at the best price. The only problem is that is would end up more expensive for the consumers, and that’s probably not what’s needed during a recession…

It’s a shame, though, both for the consumers and the shops. If somebody came up with a new model so that consumers shopping online would get better produce at a better price rather than worse produce at a higher price, I’m sure supermarkets would start disappearing within a few years.

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Once we realised that we didn’t know of any provider with better coverage, Phyllis got the bright idea to google for a mobile phone mast finder, and she swiftly found this site:

Sadly, it turns out that no company has any masts nearer our house than T-Mobile, so I guess they’ll get to live a little longer.

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However, I’ve just discovered there are now sites that can help.

For instance, here is the same photo of Anna processed in three different ways by Colour Blindness Simulator:

From left to right, that’s the original, then the way it’s seen by people with protanopia, then deuteranopia, and finally tritanopia.

This is of course really useful if you’re designing user interfaces so that you don’t unintentionally create designs that are confusing or unreadable to colourblind people.

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I must say I’ve fallen in love with Dropbox. I heard about it on Facebook some months ago, but I thought it was just some kind of glorified on-line backup service.

I was wrong, however.

What Dropbox gives you is a folder that is synchronised over the Internet with their servers and from there onto your other computers. This means you don’t have to make a special copy of your files in Dropbox, but instead you can simply keep your important files in your Dropbox folder, and they’re always available everywhere. You just work on your files inside that folder, and any changes you make are quietly synchronised.

Furthermore, you can share folders with other Dropbox users, which gives you a really smooth way of sharing files with coworkers and friends and family.

You get 2GB for free, so do try it out!

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One of the good things about having a large family (there’s seven of us two thirds of the time) is that you can sometimes buy products in quantities that average families can only dream about.

For instance, I recently noticed that Shipton Mill had some really interesting types of flour for sale (e.g., Khorason and Swiss flour). Normal consumers might find the £5 shipping charge too high for a couple of bags of flour, though.

However, delivery is free if you order 24 kg or more, and we can eat our way through that amount in just a couple of months, so that was £5 saved.

It seems to be an extremely efficient web shop, by the way – I had 26 kg of flour delivered exactly 25 hours after ordering it.

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