Citizensheep. "Michael Grimes lives in Birmingham (UK). This is his blog about anything that he fancies."

There has been a flurry of people telling us that we need to react to the change in cookie law, and that we must audit our cookies first. That’s all very well, but how? How do we find out what cookies our websites are setting? Here I give some ways of finding that out. I’ve done [...]

Sick of relying on Issu, or other bloated third parties, simply for embedding documents? Well, it turns out you can embed .pdf and .ppt files via Google Docs using a simple iframe. You don’t even need a Google account. <iframe src=”http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://document.pdf&embedded=true”></iframe> Simply replace the bold text with your document’s url and style the iframe with [...]

This page has been around for a good while. I’m flagging it up now because I’m trying to build up a sort of toolkit and primer for colleagues managing websites; the rather unsophisticated ‘every user should have exactly the same experience on our website’ is – sadly and surprisingly – still a common attitude. This [...]

In my desperate attempt to grapple with Ruby people keep introducing me to new and 'better' ways to use it, before I've had a chance to understand what I was doing with the previous one they lauded. Currently under my nose is Sinatra, which would probably be great if I understood what I was doing. [...]

For months I’ve been having conversations with people about how we should set up a Rails beginners group in Birmingham, so now I’m actually going to do it. I realise that even among beginners there will be a wide range of expertise levels. Therefore I ask attenders to have at least started trying to write [...]

Explaining to the uninitiated why web feeds are useful is something a lot of us find hard to do. So here I’ve attempted to draw an analogy: with fish. I’m not actually going to try and explain what RSS is (or equivalents such as Atom), because it’s a bit technical and has a confusing history [...]

It frustrates me that organisations still seem to think they can manage their reputations by controlling what information is spread about them. This is simply not possible anymore, and attempting it just makes you seem heavy-handed and out of touch. Far better to listen to what other people are saying about you and engage when [...]

These are my links for 26 January 2009 from 12:46 to 12:46