By popular demand (well, one of my colleagues asked), I’ve added a Pinterest pin this button to the L.U.F.T.A email sharing link making tool thingamyjig.

Enjoy!

As always, thoughts, input, abuse most welcome… well maybe not the abuse so much…

This post is for my own benefit – you’re welcome to read it but I’m posting it here to make it more real for me.

I love holidays. I haven’t had enough of them in the last couple of years… partly through having a RIDICULOUS number of weddings + wedding related things to go to in the last couple of years… anyway… I just got back from a great little break to Lanzarote with 2 friends where I spent some of the time surfing, volcano exploring, eating great food and pondering my life to-do list.

The list has been a bit neglected recently, time for a refresh!

So, I sat in the sun and rewrote it.. my first decision being that it will only ever have 10 things on it maximum. This seems like a good round number to me.

I started by thinking about and writing down some of the things I’d like to change/improve and experience – this mission statement of sorts was in 3 parts: health, wealth and happiness.

It’s a very personal list, that I made SMART (Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic Time-specific). From this and a few extras I wrote my to-do / bucket list:

1. Go into space & experience weightlessness
2. Own a campervan
3. Travel more (inc. the pyramids, Machu Pichu, Paris, New York, Area 51…)
4. Reach the BSA Silver level 1 in surfing
5. Buy a second property
6. Get married – any single Zooey Deschanel-a-likes out there? get in touch!
7. Finish and publish the YRNB book
8. Cycle John O’Groats to Lands End
9. Complete the 3 peaks challenge
10. Be a world record holder

Do you have a bucket list?

A couple of weeks ago I went to the brilliant HackBmth hosted at RedWeb and hacked together a little tool to make my (and my colleagues) life easier when creating Facebook and Twitter sharing links to be used in emails, blog posts or anywhere really…

You fill in some fields (without needing to manually UTF-8 encode spaces and special characters) then you get URL’s you can use to spread the word about something..

Try this Twitter link or this Facebook one*1 to see what happens… don’t worry it won’t post anything without asking!

Now I’ll be the first to admit it was rough around the edges but functionally it worked! Woot! In just one day of coding, some rusty cogs had turned in a cobwebbed corner of my brain and I had a working tool of sorts – I should also add that I haven’t coded properly for a very long time, so I’m pretty pleased.

Today I tidied it up and made a version that anyone can use.

The twitter one just helps you make a URL in the right format – still handy as it encodes any special characters into the right format.

The Facebook sharing tool requires you to make an app at developers.facebook.com first so that you can use the app ID to make a sharing URL -  there’s no coding required, fill in the minimum fields to get an ID… if you need help with this bit, leave me a comment and I’ll write up making an app at a later date.

Here’s the mostly finished product: http://alukeonlife.com/app/lufta/

Please be gentle with it… if you have any questions leave me a comment!

*1 The Facebook example uses my RNLI email links app as the sender, you’ll have your own icon and app name in here

If you’re looking for a review of Facebook home this isn’t it… I’m thinking about how this could play out in the wider market.

>>> TNW – Facebook Home have quite a good round up or you could look on Facebook.com/home.

1) Android fans will hate it, they’ll whine about the loss of widgets, customisation and openness probably.

2) iPhone fanboys (and girls) will not be interested, they’ve likely moved to path or something far more hipster n cool.

So, with them out the way we have two main groups remaining: your average phone user (android but unaware, they think of themselves as a galaxy s3 owner etc) and the average iPhone user.

3) The average user cares about four main things (in roughly this order): messaging/calling friends, photos, Facebook and then apps (music somewhat, but I don’t think that’s the “killer app” anymore). Home quite possibly hits all of these bang on target.

By making it user centric, seamless conversations across text and Facebook messages will appeal, as will activity of friends being tied together.

Photos will be tightly integrated, what’s the app of choice? Instagram… who owns instagram… yeah, Facebook.

Apps are still there, they’re slightly hidden but I really don’t think that’ll phase most users.

What about people leaving Facebook/using it less? One of the main reasons people are leaving Facebook is that it’s not people centric, this largely changes that…. but also, the big question…

Ads – this’ll be the maker or breaker – the other thing users are pushing back against on Facebook is ads, if they feature too heavily on home it won’t fly. I’d expect them to add it later, hooking people in at first with a very light touch to advertising. It’s telling that the Facebook share price rose 3% after the announcement too.

Where does this leave your average iPhone user? I guess that depends on the uptake of home, if the iPhone app doesn’t develop, I think there’s a large chunk of users who could move to a Facebook phone that’s more people centric for all of the reasons above.

What about an iPhone 6? Who knows…!

2 final commercial considerations:

1) I’m expecting Facebook to crack down on companies using a person profile as their Facebook presence in line with a more people centric approach – those gaming the system in this way will initially, quite likely, have an advantage until this happens.

2) Reduced visibility of pages content – this is the big unknown, will this further reduce the visibility of pages without paying for promoted posts? Roll on April 12th to find out…

All thoughts, fanboy flaming, comments and paella recipes welcomed below:

One addition to the new LinkedIn profiles is the ability to add Volunteer experience to your profile.

This is a really great feature for both an individual to show support to their chosen organisation and to raise awareness of volunteering in general.

To add one to your profile select: Profile / Edit Profile from the main menu and you’ll find volunteering & causes on the right hand side.

Click this heading to add one to your profile.

You’ll then see the new section to fill out, as shown below. To add more than one, click the + Add button in the top right. You can also click and drag the up & down arrow to choose where this section sits on your profile.

Important note: to link this volunteering opportunity to the charity correctly, you’ll need to type it into the organisation field and then select the organisation from the list – as shown below.

If you just type the name in, there will be no link to the organisations LinkedIn page shown on your profile.

Click Save once you’ve finished or the + Add in the top right to add another.

Once this section is added to your profile, it’ll display the company logo next to it and when someone views your profile they can easily see the organisation you volunteer for.

Any questions, leave me a comment below.

Yesterday’s blog post went kind of crazy, and with interest from some journalists, I wanted to be really sure that my numbers were 100% accurate including all the possible data I could find.

Important note: both posts relate to casualty rate, which are accidents and injuries not fatalities.

Using 2004-2011 data Bournemouth is actually second to Portsmouth

Using 2005-2010 data Bournemouth is number one

…I leave it up to you if that makes the story any less important…

Method used:

1) Find as many years of raw data as I could to supplement the 2011 numbers I found yesterday, ignoring the council figures shown in the diagram

2) Sort all areas by pedal cycle casualty rates per 100,000

3) Score each area as per their position from 1 to 10, with anything greater scoring 10

4) Combine those scores to give a ranking

Here is the revised league of shame, using the full 2004-2011 data set:

1. Portsmouth
2. Bournemouth
3. Kingston upon Hul
4. York
5. Peterborough
6. Bristol
7. Brighton & Hove
8. Manchester
9. Poole
10. Reading

NOTE:

I found two inaccuracies in the Bournemouth Council table, compared to the National Statistics data: In 2004 Bournemouth ranked 4th not 7th and in 2010 4th not 5th.

Data sets:

If you really want the raw data sets to do your own number crunching:

All raw data exports (zip)

Casualty rates per 100,000 raw data (xls)

Final crunched version of the numbers (xls)

Thanks to the National Archives and gov.uk

“…Bournemouth has the highest death rate of cyclists outside of London…”

Ummm… say, what?? 

Did I hear that right? 

Yes, apparently I did.

You see, last week I was invited to attend the Bournemouth Cycle Forum and this little point had casually been dropped into the conversation during the evening.

Now, I was quite surprised to hear this.

Important note: both posts relate to casualty rate, which are accidents and injuries not fatalities.