David Carrington

I’ve read a few articles about spoken languages across the globe fading to non-existance because no one speaks them any more and they get forgotten.

“More than half of the word’s 7000 languages are endangered, because they consist of an unsustainably small – and declining – speaker base.” – New Scientist

On a much less epic scale, I’m concerned about my own knowledge of programming languages fading to nothing from lack of use. The best example for me is Perl.

Perl is the first server-side programming language I tried to learn to improve my websites. I made very basic guestbook scripts and that was about it, but I did (for a short time) know the syntax and some basic principles in the language. I’ve not used Perl for 5 years!

I started looking into PHP, and never looked back. So what do I remember of Perl now? Hardly anything at all.

With a few years of self-taught PHP under my belt, I’m now pushing slowly into ASP.NET. This time, I’m going to keep my PHP very much alive.

Eric Meyer pointed out that someone was looking to analyse the ALA Web Design 2007 Survey results for UK-only. I quite like this idea, and being impatient to see some results – I had a look myself. Here’s some figures to get us started:

32831 people filled out the survey.
3666 of those were from the UK.
1164 of those were Developers.
277 of those were between 21-24 (this is where I fit in).

Read more »

Based off Google Webmaster Tools, I’ve noticed some odd queries ranking my site highly:

• google log
• book results
• hosting uptime

I’m impressed how Nick’s post titled Gorilla on the drums ranks so high for the new-ish Cadbury’s advert.

I’ve been looking lately at how I can link WordPress in more closely with my phone with SMS or similar technology. One of the key things I’ve implemented is SMS notification of comments on my blog.

Every comment triggers an e-mail that gets delivered to my catch-all Gmail account. I’ve then set up a Gmail filter which finds all e-mails from my blog and forwards them to my Orange e-mail account (by phone contract provider).

Orange will then forward each e-mail as an SMS notification to my mobile. The only drawback at this stage being that it will only send a snippet of the subject – but I can at least see which post has received a comment.

It seems that Jaiku aren’t letting new uninvited users subscribe to their Twitter-like service. However, if you happen to know someone with an account then they may be able to use one of their invites to add you in.

Or if that still doesn’t help – do what I did, politely ask someone to send you an invite. Personally I used Flickr mail to send Karl Gookey a request. Thanks Karl!