1. Start the week with a #mondayMix

    #mondayMix playlists screen grab

    1. Get Spotify
    2. Create a playlist to share
    3. Make sure your title includes the #mondayMix hashtag and your Twitter @username
    4. Right-click on the playlist and select “Copy HTTP Link” (this is the bit you’re going to share)
    5. Share it on Twitter, say something like “check out my #mondayMix, hope it gets you all going! http://is.gd/1Kefj”
    6. The best bit – find other people’s #mondayMix’s by searching on Twitter

    Here’s my playlist, it’s optimistically summer themed!

    Posted July 27, 2009 in the Geek, General, Projects, Web 2.0 category, with the tags: , , , , , and no comments yet

  2. How to get cheaper train fares between Brighton and London – train hacking!

    You do not need to be spending £20 to get a return ticket to London from Brighton! A day trip to the capital can cost you just £13.50, this is how..

    train hacks - cheap travel between brighton and london

    Disclaimer – there are no tricks, slight of hand, illegal activity or rail discount cards used in this hack.

    As an ongoing promotion to get more people visiting London, “British Rail” offer a ticket called the Super Off-Peak Day Return (previously known as the Price Buster!!1!one!). This ticket can only be purchased in Brighton, as it’s designed to get people to travel to London to presumably spend money on touristy things. Traveling to Brighton as a tourist, well that’s of course, unheard of! (duh)

    However, it’s possible to get this same ticket in London, for the purposes of traveling to Brighton. Let me explain.

    Traveling from Brighton to London to Brighton (a day return)

    1. Use a “quick ticket” machine, this is important, the staff on the counter will try to up-sell you other versions
    2. Select “find station” or “station a-z” and explicitly type in “London V”, this is because you’re going to London Victoria, not “London Terminals” which is pretty much everywhere (and becomes important later in the story *)
    3. Select the only station you’re presented with in the results, which will be London Victoria
    4. Now, on the right hand side list, select the Super Off-Peak Day Return, it’ll be £13.50
    5. Done. Now of course, this can only be used off-peak, so that’s after 10am on the way out, and not between 4pm and 6pm on the way back. (or something like that, you work it out)

    What’s important to remember is that the train companies, and in fact their business models, are profiting through obscurity. By this I mean that they take advantage of us by providing an awful user experience that ends up in us spending the most money. The first options we see are the most expensive, not the most economical. This is bad for several reasons, but mainly (for me, personally), is that if the trains *were* cheaper, or more people knew how to get cheap fares, then we would use the trains more, and thus not our cars. Big picture, joined up thinking guys! Come on!

    Traveling the other way, London to Brighton to London (also a day return)

    Now this is the fun bit. (if you enjoy watching confused people trying to work out what you’re up to)

    1. This time, queue up at the counter. Yes you’re going to have to try to have a conversation with one of these people. They (usually) don’t want to help you, be prepared for questions.
    2. When it’s your turn, which it will be eventually, trust me, ask the nice person for a Super Off-Peak Day Return from *Brighton* to *London. Yes, from *Brighton* to *London*.
    3. Answer their questions with “yes, I know it sounds weird, and yes I know I’m already in London, I know what I’m doing. Kthx.”
    4. Hopefully you’ll then be able to pay them £13.50 for your ticket, which will be a return, from Brighton to London and back to Brighton. (bear with me)
    5. If you’re not now paying for your ticket right now, that may be because they’ve claimed that it’s not possible to sell you a ticket from a station that you are not at. This is not true. They can sell you a ticket from *anywhere to anywhere*.
    6. To prove this, use this logic: ask them to try, if the computer doesn’t let them, then it’s not possible, and they will be proven correct! However, if it works, you get your ticket.
    7. And here’s the clever bit, you’re now going to use the return half of your ticket for your outgoing journey to Brighton. And then your outgoing half of your ticket for your journey back to London. This is the bit that confuses them, they don’t life hack. What you’re essentially buying is two one-way tickets, it doesn’t matter which order you use them in.

    It’s important to stand your ground, you are in the right in this situation. They just have a failure to understand the logic. What you need to impress upon them is that that is not important! Their job is to sell you a ticket.

    Of course there would be no need for this hack if they played nice. Old (business 1.0, ack) school businesses need to understand that, long term, being nice is better. Simple as that. Make it obvious that the cheap tickets exist, or better still, reward us for wanting to use the train at all!

    * London Victoria isn’t the same as London Terminals. If you try to buy a ticket from the ticket machines in London Victoria, they don’t allow you choose where you’re traveling from, and default to London Terminals. Clearly you are standing in London Victoria. This is why you have to queue up and explicitly ask for the ticket you want.

    UPDATE 1: I got a tip the other night about the “DaySave“, which is an all-day ticket that can be used throughout the entire Southern network, starts at £10 off peak, peak is only £30. Could be a winner!

    Posted October 17, 2008 in the Geek category, with the tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , and 15 comments

  3. My list of tips for getting the most out of Twitter

    (alternative title – How to use social media such as twitter to be nice)

    Just a very quick list of tips for those of you that are new to using Twitter.

    But first, Lisa Nova, who I think shows how bad the Twitter addiction can get.

    1. Put your real name in the name field when you sign up.
      If you follow people then they will know who you are. If you have nothing in your profile but your chosen username/handle/nickname then you risk not being followed back purely because you’re effectively anonymous.
    2. Put a link to a website that has more info about you or what you do in the website field
      If there is no link for people to follow if they’re interested in knowing more, then again, you risk not being followed back. And even worse, if you represent a brand or have an interesting project you’re working on then nobody will know!
    3. Introduce yourself when you follow someone
      As you’ll discover yourself, it’s really hard to know where someone might have found you, and why they’re following you. If somewhere in your recent tweets there’s a message saying hi and who you are, or where you met, then it’s instantly easy to know how that connection is made.
    4. Use @replies (what are @replies) at the beginning of your tweet rather than half way through (if the context works)
      Replies to people using the @joshr method only appear in the replies tab on Twitter’s own site if the @reply was at the beginning of your tweet. If the @joshr is in the middle of your tweet then Twitter treats this as a mention, rather than a reply. This is ok as well, as they can be found (and in fact explicitly searched for) in the Twitter search, but that’s not so obvious
    5. When posting links, say something about what that link is to
      This may sound obvious, but it’s very common for links to be posted with no explanation whatsoever about what might be on the page linked to. Why should people follow it? Give context to your link and get the traffic. Quite often the good links float to the top on Twitter, as people consciously choose to post them, it’s not a constant river of links like in your RSS reader. (That deserves it’s own post, I’ve almost stopped using my RSS reader thanks to Twitter being my filter)
    6. Your photo (avatar) should be of you, more specifically of your face
      You know, so we can see you. People are visual creatures, if you’ve met someone you want to follow then they’re more likely to remember your face than remember your name. Of course changing your avatar occasionally for fun and memes is ok too :)
    7. Don’t post nothing
      If you don’t post anything, then you’re missing the point of half of Twitter. The other half is to listen and read what your friends are up to. But not saying anything yourself can at worst be seen as creepy, and at best lurking or stalking. This is a 2-way medium, you never know, you might find some interesting people following you because of what you wrote.
    8. Don’t post too much
      If you post all day about that link you found or how cute your cat is, and i mean an excessive amount (more than 50 times a day maybe?), then your signal to noise ratio won’t be great. This may be a reason you’ll lose followers, or not gain them in the first place. There may be a chance you’ll get mistaken for spam too, this is also not good. (by the way, spam doesn’t work on Twitter, we just block and don’t follow, there-fore we’re not hearing you OK?!)
    9. Be aware of timezones
      If there is someone you really want to get noticed by, it’s worth tweeting at a time when they’re awake. So if they’re on the other side of the world, you might be pulling some late nights.
    10. If you’re a brand, pay attention to what people are saying about you
      Again, this might sound obvious, but doing this is not always easy. Use the Twitter search to search for you brand, remember to try other iterations of the name (hyphens, numbers, acronyms), and then feel free to respond or reply to people talking about your stuff. This shows that you are a human and that you care. There is nothing like a personal touch when it comes to business, got it! :) There’s a lot to take advantage of when creating content online or interacting with customers and users online. It should be part of your communication strategy to blog, Twitter, and generally get involved. Play with your users in their playground, but play nice.
    11. The Internet never forgets
      I can’t impress this one on you enough, be careful what you say online (not just on Twitter, but everywhere else too). If you ever want to delete what you’ve written somewhere, you can do that. Twitter has a delete button next to every tweet you write. But your tweets are archived elsewhere and are findable in Google. Even the Twitter search database is different, your tweets are not removed from there. In fact look at it this way, when you delete a tweet, you’re only deleting it from your timeline, nowhere else. Welcome to the world of caching, that’s something you should look up and understand.

    I’m on Twitter as joshr, I’m sure I break the rules all the time, but it’s always on my mind. Remember the value of the relationships, and remember who’s following you, they’re potentially listening to everything you say, good or bad!

    There are loads of technical tips too (things like not posting two links next to each other because only one of them will be clickable..) but that’s been covered a lot, and most of those tips will probably become deprecated as they get fixed or as user’s behaviours change to adapt to them.

    If you have more tips please post them in the comments, or better still blog your list and trackback :)

    Some useful references:
    Twitter fan wiki, loads of hack, tips, tricks and plugins or apps for Twitter
    Twitter Search, searches not for friends, but for things people have said (We made something that lets you add a search box to your Twitter page)

    Posted October 7, 2008 in the Geek, Lists category, with the tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and 7 comments

  4. We added search to Twitter

    Ok, not really.. We just added a search field to the interface using a Greasemonkey script.

    Searching Twitter from the page

    Get it here (there’s an install link on the right hand side of the next page)

    For help on installing Greasemonkey scripts read my previous post.

    Posted July 18, 2008 in the Geek category, with the tags: , , , , , and 5 comments