Actually that’s not quite true: Nicky doesn’t actually have a shop. What she does have is a website, a Flickr account and a load of junk.

It was rather an unsual shop because it didn’t sell anything. You see, everything in that shop window was a thing that somebody had once lost and Nicky had found…

That bit is true. Nicky finds junk lying around the streets of Digbeth and blogs about it.

…And brought home to DiGpuss. Nicky’s cat DiGpuss.

Actually the cat in question is called Flossy, but hey; the point is that Flossy now has a lot of junk. You can see her latest acquisitions here.

I keep meaning to write about this (now spurred into action by spotting that Nicky Getgood has finally blogged about it too) because it’s partly my fault that DiGpuss exists. It was the brainchild of Shona McQuillan many moons ago – although of course Nicky’s been collecting her rubbish for some time – and I promised to turn it into something visual. Five months later I finally came good on that promise.

I say ‘good’; the images don’t display properly in Internet Explorer and the links don’t work in Opera, but everything’s ok in Safari and Firefox. One day we might fix that. It’s all done with HTML and CSS; no scripting except a bit of php to pull the rss feed from Flickr.

But it’s fun. So go on, pay a visit to DiGpuss.

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Pete Ashton recently wrote about how we should put more of ourselves into our online activity, as that is what gives it meaning. I agree, although I’m not sure it’s any different from offline activity. And it depends on why you’re active in that realm in the first place.

If your intention is to grow a network of friends or professional contacts then yes, the more you can engage in an honest and personal way the better. However I personally have no problem with people just broadcasting if that’s what they feel comfortable with, or if they’re simply having fun doing it.

However I do tend to agree with Pete’s idea that people bond around ‘pointless, transient, silly and fun things’. I think this is because they are actually safe and easy ways to form connections with other people (something we tend to crave). This is certainly what I’ve been getting out of blogging and Twitter. And as a result, as Pete suggests, this has led to more serious discussions and collaborations (such as the recent re-writing of Birmingham’s Big City Plan).

Use of the internet does not in itself create frinedships. I suspect that those friendships formed purely through Twitter will be much less durable than those that have also developed offline, especially now that Twitter is getting so big and people are spreading themselves much more thinly.  What the internet does offer is a way of discovering and cementing friendships much more quickly than ever before. But the way we engage in those friendships is really no different.

I was recently encouraged to participate in a sort of  ‘chain letter’. I had to write seven things about myself that other people may not know, then pass the task on to seven others. I don’t usually like this sort of thing because it makes me feel obliged to do something I’m not entirely comfortable with else feel guilty for letting someone down; and angry with that person for obliging me to do it in the first place.

But this one was passed to me just after I’d read Pete’s post, and around the time that Jon Hickman had set up @cluedo on Twitter (which encouraged people to discover someone’s identity by asking questions of them). So the ‘chain letter’ seemed an ideal way of further developing new friendships: I was genuinely keen to discover more about the people I was getting to know, in their words, and to share (just a little bit) more of myself.

As a result I know that Nicky didn’t start talking until she was three years-old, Jon doesn’t like vegetables, Midge regrets not taking his physics degree seriously and Bruce is actually quite shy. Not greatly illuminating in themselves, but they all help to create richer connections between these people.

We don’t use the internet because we’re friendless, unintersting geeks who sit at home blogging and twittering because we have no life: we use it precisely in order to support and enrich our thoroughly active offline lives.

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Obviously (I hope!) you need to start by going to ‘Settings’ then ‘Postalicious’ in the admin area of your WordPress blog.

1. Set value for ‘Minimum bookmarks’ to 1.
2. Select ‘Post at most … bookmarks per post’ and set value to 1.

This will ensure that each new bookmark appears as a separate post on your blog. Unfortunately you can’t also set a specific time, so a new post will be added whenever Postalicious is updated. (Postalicious will update either hourly or automatically: you can change this at the top of the Postalicious settings page.)

Now to get it to display what you want. This is how I did it (see example post):

Settings

Post title (single day)

Changed value to %title%.

This makes the title of the post on your blog the same as the title of the bookmark on delicious.

Post title (two days)

Changed value to %title%.

You shouldn’t need to worry about this if you’re only displaying one post at a time, but it’s probably worth it just in case.

Bookmark

Changed value to <p>%date%</p><p>%description%</p><p><a href="%href%">Visit <strong>%title%</strong></a></p>

This is the bulk of the post, and you have quite a lot of control over configuring it if you know a little html. My code explained:

<p>%date%</p><p><a href="%href%">Visit <strong>%title%</strong></a></p>

1. <p> opens a paragraph
2. %date% will display the date the bookmark was added
3. </p> closes the paragraph.
4. Again, <p> opens a paragraph;
5. <a href="%href%"> opens the tag for a hyperlink
   • %href% adds the web address for the bookmark;
6. Visit <strong>%title%</strong> is extra text that I wanted to add
   • %title% inserts the title of the bookmark (as in ‘Post title…’ above);
   • <strong>%title%</strong> makes the title bold;
   • </a> closes the hyperlink;
7. </p> closes the paragraph.

That’s how I’ve done it anyway, but of course you can use whatever html you want.

Post template (single day)

Changed value to %bookmarks%.

This field can have other text and html, but it must contain %bookmarks% in it somewhere. %bookmarks% inserts everything from the ‘Bookmark’ field (explained above) into the main body of your blog post.

Post template (two days)

Same as for single day, above. You shouldn’t need this if you’re only displaying one post at a time, but better to be safe than sorry.

Notes

The values with percentage signs (%title%, %href%, etc) are the codes that Postalicious uses to add the content to your post. When you save the settings (don’t forget to do that!) these values will still be there. Don’t worry, the published post will look as it should do.

To make the posts look different I also tampered with my theme’s templates, but that’s more complex and beyond the scope of this post.

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