James Smith

Twitter, while it has its problems, does one thing very well. The IM interface allows you to update your status via a Jabber account, which just makes it so easy to do. Facebook, on the other hand, has no such facility, which is unfortunate because although I like the Facebook service, I hate using the website itself. Yes, OK, you can update your Facebook status via Twitter, but I write different things on Facebook and Twitter, so I didn't want to go down that route. So, my solution? Write my own!

JabberStatus is a simple Ruby script which listens on a Jabber account and updates your Facebook status for you. You add facebook@jabber.org to your Jabber contact list, then it says hello and gives you instructions on what to do. You click a couple of URLs to give it access to your Facebook account, and that's it! Then you just send it status updates, and it posts them on Facebook for you. It's free for anyone to use, so give it a go!

Technically, it's pretty cunning though I say so myself. It stores Facebook session data for each person that talks to it in it's own Jabber contact list, so no backend database is required. Anyway, it's all open source so you can take a look yourself. You can even run your own instance of it. It's still under development (needs code tidying up, as well as better error handling), but it's out there working now, so have a go.

Well, it's been quiet here recently, but that's because I've been working on a new project, which is slowly getting closer and closer to being ready. It's only open to testers at the moment, but there is now a tour which can be seen by anyone, so I thought I'd link it.

I present to you: The Carbon Diet!

The what now? Well, it's basically a carbon calculator on steroids. We've all seen the dodgy carbon calculators on various websites, but they're not really any good to tell you what you're really contributing. You can get a rough idea, but they're not great. The Carbon Diet is different. By entering easily-obtained data like actual electricity and gas readings, as well as fuel purchases, the site can calculate exactly what your contribution to climate change is, both for right now, and over time. It should allow people to really see how much CO2 they are producing, it should allow them to work out how best to reduce that amount, and it should prove to them that what they have done has worked.

If that sounds interesting, head on over and take the tour! If you want to help with the testing phase, then sign up and I'll get you sorted out :)