Hackitude is what I’d like to think of as a “problem solving weekend”: two nights of designing and building solutions to problems posted by the people of Birmingham. They could be anything from mapping public transport routes to adding data to building a community site to putting together an iPhone app to monitor the city’s pigeon populous. Really, anything.

As long as it’s non-commercial and everyone is fine with the code being shared and licensed under Creative Commons, we should end up with bodies of working code that can make a difference.

There’s a website coming, but the key thing now is for you and your friends to think about problems you’d like Hackitude to solve. We’ll have a big list of them from which each working group will be able to choose, so don’t be shy. If you just want to get it off your chest, I’m @moxypark on Twitter so feel free to shout, otherwise watch this space as a website will be up very soon.

Get thinking. What great idea have you had that you’d love someone to build? Do you know of a community that could really use a site, but doesn’t have the expertise? Can you pair up a dreamer with a coder?

Thanks! And feel free to use the hashtag #hackitude. WOOT!

So to that end, who fancies a hacking weekend? I’m not proposing a date, time or venue just yet, but I like the idea of throwing a bunch of problems on a wall and letting Birmingham’s creative talent solve them, in small groups or single parties. By “problems” I could mean anything from tacking on new features and adding data to BCCDIY, building up Live Brum, giving some love to the Rhubarb Radio website or anything from scratch or pre-existing that is open source and not for profit. All the work would be owned by the community who developed it, and available under SVN for anyone to checkout.

I’d like to keep it digital as that’s the world I’m familiar with, and I think it’s the area in which so much gets said and so little done (by the people who do the talking, I mean). So how about coming together from a Friday evening to a Sunday afternoon, finding a space, getting some beer and pizza in, laying down some sleeping bags, plugging in your laptops and solving some problems?

Let’s do something for Birmingham. Not to show up another city or to pat ourselves on the back at the next industry conference, but for the love and the craft of it. Waddayasay?

If you have an idea for a song I should do, lemme know and I’ll see if I can’t make it happen next Sunday.

But I got quite curious as to how people spend their mornings, on a day-to-day level. So I thought I’d ask.

Why not let me know via AudioBoo what your morning routine is?

After experimenting with a solution, it seems the best way round it is simply to store the numbers as strings of text, which we’re now doing. So the good news is, you should be able to repaste tweets that have already been pasted. The bad news is that some tweets pasted before today will be plagued by the same problem.

But staying positive, TweetPaste is bags more scalable than it was only a couple of hours ago. Vive le tweets!

Adam complained a couple of weeks ago that people were appropriating Joe’s singles more than his, so I thought I’d have a bash at doing one for the madeup jokes segment. I don’t know if anyone else has submitted jingles for this bit; I certainly don’t remember hearing them played out, so here’s my attempt.

The BBC is obviously the market leader. Its iPlayer was in public beta in 2005, and its user-base expanded rapidly last year. Most of the time it works perfectly, but when you have no telly and you see nothing but the spinning “wait” graphic, it can be quite maddening when it doesn’t. Channel Four, despite having an arse-ugly website, seems to have quite a good player. Ads appear before the programme and during the breaks, and you can’t skip past them, which is clever. I don’t think I had a single buffering problem with C4, and I watched a good deal of programmes through it.

ITV’s is much the same, although their big problem is that they seem to have a very small pool of extremely annoying adverts. I watched an episode of Benidorm, which has I 2 breaks. And if I’m not mistaken, the same ad was featured in every single break (that’s 3 altogether, with some ads before and during the show). And really, is a person watching Benidorm on an iMac with a large screen (for they kind find out all of this) really going to buy a Glade Plugin that’s advertised by two women from the early 90s? Well, “it is from Glade, you know”. [shudder] But I guess that’s the problem when you’re an also-ran, and scared or just incapable of innovation. Harsh?

Quality is also an issue. The HD version of the programme I was watching on the iPlayer didn’t work, even with my 20mb broadband, despite the service saying it only needed 3. Then there’s the problem with this – to my mind mistaken and antiquated – idea that the Rules have to change because something’s on the web. It’s fine to pop a film on BBC One and simulcast it online; no-one’s going to stop going to the cinema or buying DVDs as a result. The web has matured, and it’s about time broadcasters did, IMHO.

And that’s really the nub. If you want to watch programmes weeks later, you could ditch your TV and your pay-monthly subscription and buy them from iTunes. I really quite like how their TV purchasing and film rental systems work. Slick and simple. But if you want to watch anything live, from reality TV to sport, in most cases you’re out in the cold. If you’re lucky, it might be watchable at bbc.co.uk/bbcone/watchlive or whatever, but in most cases you’ll be hearing about it at work before you see it.

A week or so before I decided to unplug, I’d considered upgrading my package and adding a TV recorder in the bedroom, as it’s not much extra and means I can fall asleep to the telly rather than try and prop my eyes open when I slump into my comfy chair. And it’s comfort and the notion of switching off which render “real” telly an essential part of my life. I doubt I’d feel differently with a swanky setup that streamed telly from my Mac to another room, because I’ll miss Derren Brown trying to predict the X Factor winner a mysterious second before he/she is announced

Telly come back! I’m sorry!

It couldn’t be simpler to use, too. Just download it from wordpress.org (or directly from your WordPress admin area by searching the Plugins directory for “tweetpaste”), install and activate it, then use the shortcode [tweet url=%url%], replacing %url% with the address of the tweet you want to embed.

If you’re not sure how to get that address, just find the tweet on twitter.com, click the timestamp underneath the body of the tweet, and copy the URL that’s in your address bar. If you want to save space, you can even use [tweet id=%id%], replacing %id% with the string of numbers at the end of the tweet URL.

You can customise the width of the tweet box from the Settings > Embeded tweets menu item, and specify any of the options in the TweetPaste API in your [tweet] shortcode.

And don’t worry about maxing out your server with lots of expensive calls to TweetPaste. The plugin caches the results of the API call, which means you get the best of both worlds: if we make changes to the way tweets are displayed, you’ll see them instantly because it’s using JavaScript, and because that call is made by the user’s browser, your server only makes a call to TweetPaste the first time you embed a tweet, or change the formatting options.

But as always, the system is totally accessible. Users who don’t have JavaScript get pretty much exactly the same experience as those with.

So have a play, and let me know what you think in the comments. If you like it, please rate it highly!

Stuff I’d like to add

I want to be able to let you guys clear your cache, incase we make a major update to TweetPaste meaning the API generates new embed code. I’m quite new to WordPress plugins but only build stuff to best practices where possible, so I need to find out the agreed way of doing this. If you know, tweet me yeah?

There are some big improvements to TweetPaste itself that I’d like to make, but we’ll come to those later.

I’m a big fan of Markdown, a really simple text markup system which is human-readable, and so human-editable. It’s almost as flexible as HTML, offering a number of extensions, but reads in a very sane and sensible way. (Bulleted lists are denoted by an asterisk, numbered ones by using the appropriate digit and a full stop.)

I was surprised that no plugin already existed for this purpose, so I knocked together markdown-widget, implementing Michel Fortin’s brilliant Markdown Extra script.

Requirements

This plugin requires WordPress 2.8 or later, as it uses the new Widget API.

How to use

1. Just download the Zip file, extract it and and upload it to your /wp-content/plugins directory or install it via the Plugins menu in your WordPress dashboard.
2. Activate the plugin.
3. Select Widgets from the Appearance menu, then simply drag and drop a Markdown Text widget onto a sidebar
4. Enter a title for the widget
5. Enter the main body of your text below the title, using the Markdown syntax