For the past couple of months myself and a friend have been developing a new website for our local Bahá’í community. We started with a document passed to us via the UKs office of Public Information, which immediately required we change our domain name.

Our original domain name was bonut.org.uk, which stands for Bahá’ís of Newcastle upon Tyne, which actually sounds very unprofessional and a wee bit silly. So we have moved to NewcastleBahais.org.uk, we wanted NewcastleBahais.org, but this was taken by a community in a small village in the US which is also called Newcastle.

It was recommended to have our site built using the Jimdo service, which would have cost us £60 a year, not a lot some might say, but we figured we could do better, for free.

There is one site up that uses the Jimdo service, BromleyBahai.org.uk, and it looks pretty good, but looking at it in some detail, we figured we didn’t need the Jimdo service, we decided to go with a Wordpress based site.

Wordpress is a pretty decent open source blogging platform, but it’s also a pretty good Content Management System. Its easy to use, very flexible with a wide range of plugins and extensions, its appearance is also very customisable with a wide variety of themes which can all be altered if you know a little HTML. I use Wordpress on this blog, and so does the UK Baha’i news website.

One big advantage is that with minimal setup, you can use MS Word, and OpenOffice.Org Writer to publish articles, Microsoft also produces the excellent Windows Live Writer which is extremely good at this. So combine these with the excellent Wordpress Dashboard, and you have a fantastic bit of kit that can be used by anyone, no need to know how to code HTML.

Now for content, we have decided to go with some static basic info, trying to give a little background on the faith and what we do, but for in depth stuff directing them to the relevant info at Bahai.org. We have place the blog items in a news section, where we are publishing local news items, in order to bulk it out a bit, we are also using a plugin to republish relevant news items from news.bahai.org and Bahainews-uk.info.

We have also used Google Calendar to publish our calendar on, this is a brilliant tool as its so easy to update and we have been able to pop an upcoming events box in our sidebar and using a clever little redirect, the sub-domain calendar.newcastlebahais.org.uk, is our calendars’ homepage.

While we have been doing this, we have been looking at all the ways we communicate with the world at large and keep people updated, on what we do and our events. We have had a Facebook Page for a while, which is working ok, and we are learning more and more how to make better use of it. One thing which we have put to good use is our Twitter account @newcastlebahais, now you will all no doubt know, that I love Twitter, its a great tool and can really work well at keeping people updated on what your doing.

We have got our Facebook page and our Twitter account linked, so that whenever we update the Facebooks Page status or add a new note etc, it updates the Twitter account, which is nice. The SMS updates that you can get with Facebook and Twitter are both pretty good, but I will have to write a guide to help people make better use of them.

One unintended consequence of doing all this is that we have had to develop a consistent, for want of a better word, “brand”, which we can use across all services. My wife is a pretty fair artist, and has designed a simple logo, it’s a nine-pointed Bahá’í star, which is black on the outside and blue on the inside. Originally it was black & white, Newcastle’s colours, but it was a bit too dull, so she added the blue, and it’s worked quite well. It’s only a temporary thing; I am sure in time we will come up with something brilliant and catchy and Geordie.The hardest thing has been keeping the site a Bahá’í site, but at the same time local, and locally relevant, this has been hardest to do when it comes to the banner. The Bromley site is a banner with some local landmarks, none of which I am afraid to say stand out for me, as someone who hasn’t visited Bromley in maybe 9 years. So we have tried to used some of the great symbols of our city in our banner and try and make it well, a Bahá’í banner as well. That is something we are still working on.The site is now pretty much complete on the engineering side, just got to sort out the static content and I think we are pretty much done; hopefully we can get it launched in the next few weeks.I shall keep you updated, and let you know when we launch.God BlessMichael

I have once again been asked to test the new Xbox 360 Dashboard update, and this time its a fun one, adding, Twitter, Live.FM and Facebook.

Installation was actually quite long, it took 10 or so minutes for the update to download and another few minutes to install. So I decided to get in and try the new features.

Twitter

Twitter is now located in the My Community section and started straight up, the interface is crisp and clean, but it is very limited. You can only see the last 50 tweets from your followers, which depending on your twitter use, may or may not be an issue. The annoying thing is that you can’t click on @mentions or #hashtags, and given the lack of a browser on the Xbox, you can’t obviously follow links.

It clearly has lots of potential, if it can take over from the #xboxtweet service, it would be great, so every time you got a new achievement it tweeted it to the world.

Facebook

Like twitter Facebook is located in the My Community section, however, it requires a small download, before you can use it, which is actually quite annoying considering you just had to run through that big download and install.

When up and running, its not too bad actually, a bit basic, like Facebook on my Blackberry. The photos are actually better than on Facebook proper, with full screen photos and very quick loading times.

One cool feature which I have yet to really exploit properly is that you will be able to see whom of your Facebook friends have an Xbox Live account and vice versa, allowing you make more connections which is brilliant, hopefully my mum won’t turn out to be on Xbox Live though as that would be pretty embarrassing!

Eventually Microsoft has promised automatic status updates from the games your playing, and in game screen shots and videos uploaded directly to Facebook, nice.

Last.FM

Last.FM also needs downloading and again that’s quite annoying. But its pretty good, as long as you have scrobbled enough tracks its pretty good, it allows you to listen to your stations, create new ones, skip tracks, love tracks, ban tracks and evn get more info on the bands.

Only down side, it can’t be played in the background, so no I can’t play Forza 3 with the Last.FM stuff streaming in the background, but hey at least I have an internet radio in my living room now!

Other Features

A few other features have been added as well. There is now a Music Marketplace, where you can surprisingly buy music and music videos. The downloadable tracks for the music games like Lips, Guitar Hero and Rock Band now have their own category, so they won’t drown out the rest of the marketplace. The Halo Waypoint is also coming next week, so we will see what’s that’s like.

They have also added Zune to the video marketplace, a change which frankly, seems pointless and a poor relation the US Netflix service, but ahh well, tomorrow (27th October) we get Sky Player!

Conclusion

All in all its not too bad, it makes a good case for the chatpad, which will no doubt become an essential accessory, and if a few tweaks are made, it can only add to the Xbox experience.

Have Fun

Michael

You can’t escape the news of the presidential election in Iran and what has arisen from it. But I am not going to discuss that here. What I want to talk about is the impact that social media service, particularly Twitter, have had in this election and how they have been used.

The Internet is a wonderful thing, it is not controlled by any one nation and is very very difficult to censor, just look at the difficulties the Chinese government has trying its best to censor the web.

The Iranian government pretty early on in this campaign tried very hard to block access to many sites, including the BBC, Facebook and Twitter among others, but by using proxy servers, some even provided by the US government, many Iranians have found ways around the blocks. But site blocking is something that Iranians are used to as Iran blocks more Internet sites than any other nation, bar China.

Interestingly the software that Iran uses to block access to many Iranian sites is Secure Computing’s, SmartFilter. Secure Computing is an American company and under US law they are forbidden from having any dealings with the Iranian government. Turns out that the Iranian government use a pirated copy, where they got it from who knows but the US government and Secure Computing are both trying very hard to stop Iran from using it.

On Facebook the main opposition candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousav, had a very good coordinated campaign going on to rally support for him, in fact he had over 6000 supporters. Now don’t take that as an endorsement of his candidacy, remember I don’t do politics.

During the election Twitter became a very important tool, allowing Iranians all over the country to swap proxy server details, and basically coordinate a campaign at grassroots. They used a few key hashtags, #IranElection, #iranvote and #gr88 to get their messages across. Realising the importance that Twitter has had on this election, the US State Department asked Twitter to delay a scheduled service upgrade that would have potentially cut off access to Twitter during the Iranian daytime.

Now I have been keeping an eye on these feeds, and to start off with most of the messages are from Mr Mousav’s supporters, so I am not under an illusion that these feeds truly represent the will of the Iranian nation, but what has fascinated me is the battle that has going on in these feeds for the past couple of days.

So what has this battle been about, well the Iranian security services have been trying to use biographical data on Twitter to try and find details of users on Iran, and have been contacting those that they can find and telling them to stop, so a campaign has started to try and get as many Twitter users as possible to change their details to living in Tehran and their time zone to be GMT +3:30, hoping that the Iranian security services will be overwhelmed, and unable to find genuine Iranian bloggers.

Originally Twitter was a great place for proxy server details and many servers details have been shared, but as they are on open channels the Iranian Security Services have been able to block these as well. So people are being encouraged to use direct messaging to trusted Tweeters instead of ReTweets.

Now things have stepped up a level and Twitter is being used to coordinate distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) on Iranian government web servers. Not the best idea in the world as it also affects the network with normal Iranians need to do everyday things.

So the Security Services are now striking back, setting up their own Twitter accounts and turning these tactics on the opposition, there have been many false rumours planted by Security Service personnel, usually quite inflammatory, such as Mr Mousav has been assassinated, or the army are bringing tanks into the the area where protests are taking place. They put these rumours out there in order to try and let them filter down to the protesters and cause them to get a bit hyped up and give them an excuse to get tough.

I am seeing a war of attrition really, as the protesters and their supporters find new ways of communicating and hitting back at the government, the Security Services get more and more clever about countering these moves. Some new accounts have suddenly appeared on Twitter, all appearing to be accounts of people who would never in a million years be members of the Iranian Security Services, such as an American Gay Punk Rocker, and these accounts have been suggesting new targets for the DDOS, which just happen to turn out to be proxy servers used by the protesters or opposition websites.

Now the most disturbing tactic I have seen is the contacting of overt Bahá’ís on Twitter and appealing to their concern over the treatment of their fellow Bahá’ís in Iran and trying to get us to spread this information, I have been contacted myself and I can honestly say its a bit below the belt. Now Bahá’ís in Iran are treated rather badly by the government, with over 200 having been executed or mysteriously disappeared since 1979, but now they are trying to drag us into this mess.

Now I do not support the candidacy of any of the men standing to become Iranian president, because like all other Bahá’ís, I don’t do politics, and we are not going to overtly campaign or show preference for any candidate as we like to do things in a non-partisan manor.

The problem is with this tactic is that some other Bahá’ís may get caught up in all the excitement and may fulfil the wishes of the Iranian Security Services, giving them a reason to crack down on the already heavily persecuted Bahá’ís of Iran. So I importune to all Bahá’ís out there on Twitter, don’t get involved, you may be doing more harm than good.

Anyway I will keep an eye and see how events progress and what effect Twitter has on them.

God Bless

Michael

If you have been following my twitter updates for the past week, you won’t have failed to notice my troubles with the Disqus comments system. What is Disqus do I hear you asking, probably not but I am going to explain anyway.

The Disqus plugin is a comments system that replaces the default Wordpress comments system and replaces it with a more funky and functional one. My experiences all started when I wondered if there was a way to change the default avatars in the Wordpress system from gravitars to twitter pictures. Only problem was that every tool out there I could not find simple instructions on how to integrate it into my system, they were not written for Wordpress 2.7. But then I found a plugin called twitconnect, which allowed commenter’s to sing in with twitter, which was great but then I got to thinking, well what about Facebook, so I looked around and came across blog after blog which offended sign in with both twitter and Facebook via the Disqus plugin,

Now I had a few problems with getting it running, but ignore mine, my.htaccess file was all messed up and was causing all sorts of issues but that was my fault rather than Disqus’s and its all fixed now.

Setting it up is actually rather easy, I downloaded the plugin, installed it and set up an account with Disqus, getting twitter sign in was easy as twitter have made it really, really easy to do it. However Facebook is another matter, to set up Facebook as an option to sign in with, you need to set up your own Facebook app, that’s right you actually have to set up an app. Now here is the bad part, Facebook have changed the process for making an app 3 times since Disqus hooked up with them so the instructions are no good however I did find some that helped me.

Now the problems I had lasted a week and I really could not get my head around it all, so I vented my frustration on twitter, and what happed, the guys behind Disqus tweeted at me and helped me sort it out, I was really impressed by their assistance and professionalism and after they were so helpful I can only highly recommend Disqus and would encourage all you bloggers out there to let them run your comments system.

Since then it works like a charm and people can sign in using both Facebook and twitter, so I get to see lovely avatars and profile pictures instead of a generic picture, which makes the whole thing look nicer and cleaner. Plus now if anybody happens to comment on other blogs which use Disqus (an ever growing number) they can use just one account to comment on all those blogs including mine! Or if they don’t they can just use their existing Facebook account. Now here is waiting for OpenIDs introduction, that would make the whole thing complete.

Now I finally feel fully connected, my blog updates twitter every time I post a new entry, twitter updates Facebook and now with Disqus people can even add to their Facebook wall their comments on my blog, so all in all its rather cool.

Have Fun

Michael