Andrew Beacock's Blog

Blogger is an excellent free blogging platform but if you want anything 'dynamic' then it starts to get in the way. One thought I've had recently was to see how I could share information captured in Google Docs Spreadsheet with Blogger. I've a few ideas which will take a few posts to explain, so let's start with the most basic - embedding a Google Spreadsheet direct into Blogger. Access the spreadsheet in Google Docs that you want to expose in Blogger, I've chosen a simple table of the most popular programming languages in 2010: Next you'll want to share this spreadsheet with the rest of the world by publishing it as a web page: Now you need to select the "HTML to embed in a page" option and copy the HTML code into the clipboard:  Open a new post in blogger and ensure that the "Edit HTML" tab is selected and paste the code in: Now publish your post and your spreadsheet will be visable in your blog post: I didn't say...

When I was preparing my last blog post on disabling HTML elements (in JSPs) with JSTL's "c:if" I needed to change a lot of the JSP markup to prepare it for adding to my posting - the angled opening and closing tags were causing quite a problem. I was about to painstakingly go through changing them all to their 'lt' and 'gt' XML entity equivalents and then remembered a site I bookmarked sometime ago: FormatMySourceCode.blogspot.com It's a very handy webpage with a box to paste your code into, select a few options such as tab width and whether you want an embedded stylesheet and then click "Format Text". It promptly returns with your code (of any kind) converted into a web-friendly version which is perfect for pasting straight into your blog post. It a great yet simple idea by Greg Houston and oh so very useful! Technorati Tags: Greg Houston , Code Formatting , Blogging , Andrew Beacock

The goal from the beginning for this blog was to write a post a week, that's the incentive that kicks me each week nagging me to write a post even though sometimes I don't want to. I've seen a number of blogs simply fade into the past after a month or two once the initial novelty has worn off - writing informative well-versed (I hope!) posts is a difficult thing to do in one's free time. I managed the grand total of one post in March but I did have a valid excuse: I had the "new job search" machine on full throttle and was spending every evening pouring over JobServe and various job blog sites. If I wasn't searching for jobs on the internet then I was either preparing for face-to-face interviews or being telephone interviewed and I just didn't have the bandwidth to blog as well. I'm pleased to say that I accepted a new development position a few weeks ago and so I'm finally leaving the mobile telecoms industry after ten years (wow, I'...

My colleague Mark Lishman has recently started blogging about all things Oracle over on Lishblog . He really knows his stuff and has a habit of explaining it so that mere database mortals such as myself can understand it. He's only just started but already has an excellent post on how to use external tables in Oracle . This is really handy when you have a massive CSV file and want to query it but can't be bothered to write in input script in Ruby or something because you will be scrapping it soon. He's a great Oracle DBA and his blog will no doubt be well worth subscribing to! Technorati Tags: , Oracle , Database , Mark Lishman , Andrew Beacock

Back in 2005 I blogged about the podcasts that I subscribe to and one of my favourites was Manager Tools . Well two years later my list has changed a little (click on the 'podcasts' link on the left for a closer look) but Manager Tools is still my favourite podcast, the moment the show music starts to play in my car I know I'm in for an hour of energetic & informative advice regarding all aspects of management & leadership. I'm amazed at how much time & effort Michael Auzenne & Mark Horstman put into producing a timely weekly show full of great content with such audio finesse as well. I was recently very fortunate to get a sneak preview of some of their premium content and I must say if it's all of the same high quality (which with Mike & Mark is a given) then it's definitely worth the month fee. They are consistantly the number 1 business podcast at PodcastAlley and have won the "Best Business Podcast" for two years in a row. ...

I received a surprise gift through the post on Saturday, a gift wrapped book off my Amazon Wish List from Robin of RobinsReviews.com . Robin sent me the book after finding the Technorati Tags Bookmarklet on my blog - thanks again Robin I hope you find it very useful! Technorati Tags: RobinsReviews , Technorati , Andrew Beacock

I'm having major internet connection problems at the moment with my net connection dropping every few minutes (hope it hangs in there whilst I post this!). I'm with Pipex although after tests it's looks like a problem with my BT line... Will hopefully get a post out soon but what with Christmas shopping, last minute project dashes and no internet I can't promise anything! :)

Based on the Firefox RSS feed icon, (and adopted by Microsoft) is the transmitting symbol that with a big push from Feed Icons is trying to become the standard symbol that means "this is an RSS feed". I've added it to my blog today to support the effort. Let's make RSS feeds simple enough for anyone to recognise - none of this orange XML this or RSS that... Technorati Tags: Blog , RSS , Icon , Feed Icons , Andrew Beacock

Thought I'd take a quick look into the issue of my broken Bloglines Greasemonkey script and spotted the issue straight away. It's a pretty simple thing really... They've changed the title of their site from "Bloglines | My Blogs" to "Bloglines | My Feeds". So all I had to do was update the little bit of code in the script that checks the title to read " if (document.title == "Bloglines | My Feeds") " and upload the script to my website. The script is available here , or through my original post which covered installing Greasemonkey as well as details of installing the script. UPDATE: I've moved some files around on my server, I've not changed any of the content of this post. Technorati Tags: Bloglines , Greasemonkey , Andrew Beacock

Back in May I blogged about modifying a Greasemonkey script written by Matthew Gertner over on the Peer Pressure blog . Well the recent additions to Bloglines has stopped my script from working, all the icons and text are back to their rather large size. I wish there was an option to set the feed list text to be small but the blog post text to be big. As that's the main reason this script exists. I'll have to see if I can figure out what's breaking it, but don't hold your breath, I'm no Javascript wizard! Technorati Tags: Bloglines , Greasemonkey , Matthew Gertner , Andrew Beacock

I was in for a treat when I got to work this morning and powered up Bloglines to catchup with what's going on in the world of tech whilst enjoying my first brew on the day. A little message at the bottom of every page informing me of some rather handy keyboard shortcuts. This was followed up sometime later by an official announcement on the Bloglines News blog . My personal favourite is the s key which moves you to the next sub-folder and just keeps going to the next, and the next, and the next... The 'next article' j key seems interesting which moves the right-hand pane to the next post from that blog, but if you have a multi-page post it will skip too far - I prefer to still use the down cursor key. The real nice thing with these keyboard shortcuts is that you can navigate around your feeds without loosing the keyboard focus on the right-hand side - I'm not sure of how many times I've pressed down on the cursor key expecting to scroll down in a long post only to ...

One of my more popular posts is regarding a bookmarklet by Oddiophile that will create the html template for any number of space-separated Technorati tags. For quite a while now the Oddiophile blog has been offline, and after quite an exhaustive search on the web I cannot find a bookmarklet that offers similar functionality. As I use it all the time for my posts (as you can tell from the bottom line of every post) I have a local copy. I'm going to put it up for distribution, if anyone has any issues with this duplication please get in touch with me by commenting on this blog post and I'll take it down (if you have a damn good reason why the blogosphere shouldn't benefit from this rather fab tool!) :) Ok, here you go... 0){a+=', ';}a+=' ';}a+=' ';prompt('Copy this code, press OK, then paste to your blog entry:',a);})()">Oddiophile's Rather Fab Technorati Tags Bookmarklet Technorati Tags: Oddiophile , Technorati , Bookmarklet ,...

Just took a quick look through my StatCounter logs, and found a strange link from Google Groups pointing at my recent post about the podcasts that I listen to. I followed it through to find Mr. IT Conversations himself, Doug Kaye , thanking me for my review : "There are new blog postings like this one *literally* every day, but I particularly liked what Andrew had to say" Cheers for the kind words Doug! Technorati Tags: IT Conversations , Doug Kaye , podcast , StatCounter , Google Groups , Andrew Beacock

Peter Cooper asked a few days ago about what podcasts people are subscribing to . Here's my list: IT Conversations IT Conversations got me into podcasting, it's the original and the best for anything to do with technology. They have loads in interesting recordings, the best ones for me are recordings of presentations given at conferences like eTech and Web2.0. If I could only subscribe to one podcast it would have to be this one. http://www.itconversations.com/index.html For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz are two communication professionals who discuss public relations, corporate communications and how that intersects with technology in a twice-weekly show, each show is about 1 hour in length. They normally discuss what's happening in the blog and podcasting worlds including any new tools or sites that are of use in tracking what is going on. Shel and Neville get some great banter going and so this podcast is one of my favo...

Peter Cooper in the UK has just launched Feed Digest , the successor to the very popular RSS Digest . It's a tool that allows you to put a section of HTML on your website which is powered by one or more RSS feeds so it means that your website is updated by these RSS feeds. Here are a number of things you could do with it: * Show the latest BBC news. * Display your latest 10 del.icio.us bookmarks. * Display your latest blog post in your home page. I haven't thought of my use for this yet, If I add too much other data, the blog posts will disappear into a sea of links, but it's an interesting service none the less. The other thing that is interesting about this service is that it's powered by Ruby on Rails . This is a Ruby-based web framework that I've been reading about lots but haven't got into yet. There are quite a few US-based sites that use it, but Peter 's is the first UK one that I've heard about. Technorati Tags: Feed Digest , RSS Digest ,...

Last night I detailed how to add trackbacks to Blogger , a free service provided by HaloScan . In this post I want to cover how to actually use trackbacks to enable the conversation. So you've read a blog post that you want to comment on. You want to say more than just 'great post!' but don't want your finely crafted response disappearing into someone else's comment bucket. Not only would this be never found by your blog subscribers, but it's also difficult for you to see if anyone is adding to the comment discussion. Enter trackbacks - a way for you to inform the original blog post that you have made a comment on your own blog, and that they are regarding the same topic of conversation. How do you actually use them then I hear you ask? Trackback URL First of all, make sure that the original blog actually has Trackback capability. If you can't see a 'Trackback' link mentioned at the bottom of the blog post, that author (or blogging system) doesn...

After being an RSS consumer for a while I started to pay attention to ' TrackBacks '. They are a way to allow you to comment on your own blog regarding someone else's post, but inform their blog that you have done so. By using this feature you can continue the 'conversation' without having to leave comments on the original blog and remembering to check back every now and then to see if someone has replied to you. Blogger doesn't including this feature but you can add it in easily by using a free service provided by HaloScan . I added the trackback feature quite a few weeks ago, I'm going to try and document the steps I went through as I know that Lee Hopkins has had some trouble recently, and my friend Robert Baillie is too lazy to figure it all out himself! The first thing to do is go to HaloScan and register to become a member. Once you are signed up and logged in, click 'Instructions/Code' in the 'Members' menu on the left-hand sid...

I have just listened to Lee Hopkins ' latest podcast tonight and was delighted to hear not only that he was mentioned me, but that he gave my blog a favourable review! I've been enjoying Lee's ' Better Communication Results ' podcast for quite a number of weeks now, having been referred there from the rather good ' For Immediate Release ' podcast produced by Neville Hobson & Shel Holtz . Thanks again for the mention Lee, just hope I can keep up the quality of posts that gave you such a good impression! Technorati Tags: podcast , Lee Hopkins , Better Communication Results , For Immediate Release , Neville Hobson , Shel Holtz , Andrew Beacock

Lee Hopkins (who hosts an excellent podcast on business communications ) posted a comment to my last post about MyBlogLog with a suggestion to also try out StatCounter for some excellent website (and therefore blog) statistics. It's a cookie-based system, with a small amount of JavaScript that is inserted into each and every page on my blog (easy with the use of the Blogger template). It can then report all sorts of interesting information regarding number of visitors, returning visitors, browsers & OSs used, resolutions, etc. I really need to start posting to my blog a bit more frequently, I've got a bit stuck in a rut lately, not really trying out new stuff and so my blogging has suffered. Maybe these stats will show that people do read this blog, and that might give me the kick I need, who knows... :) Technorati Tags: web tracking , web statistics , StatCounter , MyBlogLog , Lee Hopkins , Andrew Beacock

I read an interesting post on Successful Blog last night that mentioned a site called MyBlogLog.com . It's a site that with a little scriptlet that you drop into your blog template allows it to track what links on your site have been clicked, so you can see what links your readers are interested in. I've only just added it to my blog, so I've nothing to report yet but if I get any interesting statistics I'll drop them here.