I use Tweetie as my main client for communicating with people on Twitter, if you have yet to use this I would suggest giving it a go, their is no cost unless you want to have the adverts removed.  Anyway I thought it would be cool if Tweetie supported custom URL shorteners, alas it doesn’t.

First step was to ask atebits the developers behind Tweetie but hearing from atebits after making a feature request gave me some hope as there reply was that it was a heavy suggestion, which to me says that this is not the first time by far that this has been requested.

The only thing was this isn’t quick enough for me (it some times pays to be inpatient) knowing how the bit.ly API works i set to work with the intent to intersect the transmission and use my own servers.

here are the steps I made to make this possible.

first I updated my /etc/hosts file so that it would point api.bit.ly to the IP address of my web server.

Open up terminal and type;

sudo pico /etc/hosts

You will then be asked to enter your admin password so that you may edit this file. (pico is a simple text editor for mac terminal)

123.123.123.123	api.bit.ly

I Then needed to setup Apache so that it would accept api.bit.ly as if it was part of its own domain.  To do this I needed to edit the apache config for the virtual host so it included this ‘ServerAlias api.bit.ly’. A simpler way to do if you web hosting solution supports this is to just setup a domain alias of api.bit.ly for the same domain as your short URL.

With all this technical stuff out the way the next step is to impelment the same process that the bit.ly’s API does.

I Went to my domain created a folder called ‘shorten’ then created a file called index.php which look a bit like the following.

// include my Class and run with the URL that requires shortening.
require_once "../class.quick2.php";
$quick2 = new quick2();
$newlink = $quick2->addLink($_GET['longUrl']);
 
// output a simple JSON string that contains the new short URL
echo '{"shortUrl": "'.$newlink.'" }';

This is would be a bit different for most as this would only work with my own Class that I have not yet made public but the main idea is to take the variable $_GET['longUrl'] and convert that into a new short URL.

Job Done

more detail on the plugin can be found here

This dconstruct was more about where the current and past designs have come from and who/what influenced these designs. This then really made me think better from the whole conference, ok its not a session of showing off cool and audience capturing graphics and animation, but it should of hopefully made them think of new and unlikely paths to take when gathering inspiration for their next project.

The Talks

Elements of Networked Urbanism – Adam Greenfield

This talk I wasn’t so interested in but did give a small insight into what the world could be like if everything right down to the kitchen sink had an IPV6 address with an open API to communicate. His thoughts one how car shares could work I didn’t like, I’m reasonably attached to my car and would not want to share it or give it up to share someone else’s car.

Let’s See What We Can See – Michal Migurski and Ben Cerveny

This was more of a showing session where they looked at some of the projects they had done in the past. These where all to do with ways of display data and how they had taken their ideas from, some of the design came clearly because they needed to the data in such a way that would make it possible and others from other areas.

Links:

http://www.stamen.com/

What’s Next? – Brian Fling

Possible one of my favorite talks of the day. One of the main thoughts that he had, is if we create web content today in the right way according to W3C then this will be the content for the mobile future, Mobile phones started off with WAP, different content had to be created for these then more recently it got slightly better, now we have devices like the iPhone which can view websites very similar to what we get on a full screen device.

He was also talking about what he called Generation Z being the generation that are just starting to use technology, actions like touch screen swiping is natural to them and they will come to expect it these features in new designs in the future.

Make It So: Learning From Sci-Fi Interfaces – Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel

This talk had a lot of video clips from films as you might expect from the title but did show how a lot of films influenced design and in the same way technology influenced how Sci-Fi designers made there sets. I won’t go into a lot of detail as a pdf can be downloaded here if your interest and want to read on follow the link. www.nathan.com/thoughts/MakeItSo.pdf

Loving Your Player with Juicy Feedback – Robin Hunicke

Notably one of the most rememberable talks if only for her love of the word Juicy, she had a game designer background and understanding from what works in games and the feedback you get when you complete something or the interface needs to tell you something, if this feedback is how she put it Juicy meaning bright and happy then some dull tasks can be made more fun. One thing she mentioned was maybe if you do an auto-sum in Excel then drag it down columns then it might make a little bring sound and maybe that sound is able to changed to what ever the user wants.

She also made a few enemies in the audience by doing a spoiler for a film called moon.

Experience and the Emotion Commotion – August de los Reyes

This is the guy that designed the windows Key, he also works on the Microsoft Surface team http://www.microsoft.com/surface/ you would of expected a 45min session of showing off how cool the Microsoft Surface is from an MS employee but it was completely different. He talked about about what influenced his work over the years, how ideas come from different domains of thinking and technology. he finished off with a very interesting video of what the future could hold for interface design.

Dematerialising A Web of Data – Russell Davies

One of the big things I remember about this guy is how he made newspaper from peoples blog posts and gave them to the writers with a few spare, but then in making a video of making the newspaper using different music for different target audiences.

He also threw kinda eggs into the audience and then got one back which probably made the biggest laugh of the day.

Conclusion

A good day worth going to, I believe that I’ve been to better dconstucts, ideal audience would be people that in the business of developing online services but still gave me a lot to think about when I’m next designing a new system or website.

Special mention to powertraveller’s PowerGorilla to which I would not have any notes, it pretty much kept my MacBook Pro alive throughout the day even though my battery says it needs replacing.

Type kit isn’t available to the public yet but I’ve been one of the lucky few that have been given early access to use Typekit before its released to the world.

Its comes in different packages, I’m using the trial account at the moment, this only gives me access to the trial fonts which consists of about 60 fonts from various font houses.
Their is a trial, personal and full access font level which gives you access to more fonts, but the latter 2 is where you will need to part with a small amount of cash.

To implement Typekit on a website you just need to put 2 lines of code into the header so it can include the Javascript files needed to load the fonts.

Example 1

sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

Example 2 – XXX

The big advantages over Cufon and sIFR is that the fonts get used in a native way which means that its selectable and will work in thw same way as any normal font on your page, they just look better.

The bad news is compatibility, I’ve not full tested but it should work in Firefox 3.5+, Internet Explorer 5+, Safari 3.1+ Opera 10 looks a little odd but may be fixed with fully released and it should work in Google chrome.