Two days into a new working home
Inspired into crafting a miniature tome,
About pleasures of being surrounded by peers
Feeling already I’d been here for years.

From @chuckiebaker on the door to @mikebutcher starry-eyed
With @evarley diligently dashing and dignified,
Super fast broadband to upload with glee
And plentiful supplies of coffee and tea.

Dreamers and makers all plying their trade
Proud of the beautiful apps they have made,
Yes, I think I’ll be happy in this little club
So come join the family they call TechHub.

Since the app is being built on Twitter’s open API and uses various pieces of open source technology along the way, I thought I’d share our latest logo concepts (lucky you). We’ve settled on a particular type face and Ryan has been playing with a range of colour schemes. This being a Twitter app, the logo of course features a chirpy looking bird.

A holding page (with email sign up) is coming soon but let me know if you want to be a first-time beta tester before we launch to the masses.

Support Details is precisely that tool. Simply send your client (or the person you’d like settings for) a link to the website and their set up details will be handily displayed, which you could discuss over the phone, get them to send by email or export in CSV and PDF formats. The following pieces of operating system and browser data are available:

• Operating system name and version
• Screen resolution
• Web browser
• Browser window size
• IP address
• Colour depth
• Whether JavaScript is enabled
• Flash player version number
• Whether cookies are enabled

All in all a valuable asset for web designers and developers. It’s one of those tools I wish I’d thought of myself so hats off to Imulus who are responsible for it.

Recently I made a promise to myself that I would start attending more events once again. When I first started my own business (just over 3 years ago) I regularly attended popular meetups like Open Coffee, Internet Peeps dinners and others. They were a great way of meeting tech peers and getting new business, particularly for start-ups. Once you’re more established and picking up clients regularly it’s easy to fall into the routine of working hard and not getting out enough. I made the decision a few weeks ago and at my first event in a while met someone from a very large publishing group who we’re now in talks with for various opportunities, which goes to show how valuable these meetups can be.

I started talking about this with other developers and entrepreneurs and the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) came up as the next big one to attend. Almost at the same time all of the group mentioned the price as a substantial stumbling block; unless you’re a student, the cheapest ticket cost to attend the conference is a whopping £351.33. And that’s just for one day, with no workshops (which probably hold the most value). There is a great line up of speakers but that’s a reasonable amount of money, particularly for small teams, single developers or boot strapped companies.

So I thought I’d contact Ryan Carson (of Carsonified fame and FOWA founder) to find out what he thought. As you might expect, I got a couple of very nice and honest replies:

Thanks for the honest feedback. I appreciate it.

Have you considered a 1-Day pass as an alternative?

Can you please let me know what you believe *would* make it worth the cost?

As it happens, the 1-Day pass is something I had considered since it would mean not taking much time off from client work and keep the cost at the lower end of the scale. I also had a few ideas about what would make the cost worthwhile and suggested these to Ryan:

• A slight price reduction for teams of 5 or less (or similar).
• A deal on attending single workshops for conference pass holders.
• Providing videos free of charge for conference pass holders (so they can see the track talks they can’t attend). Note: This is already part of the deal when you pay for a ticket, although it’s not clear on the FOWA website.

These suggestions went down well and, who knows, feedback like this might result in a change. I’d particularly like to see deals for smaller teams who are boot strapping their start-up, although I appreciate that might be difficult to police. If nothing changes it’s good to see genuine feedback taken seriously. As a result, it’s likely I will attend FOWA. I’ll let you know if it’s worth the money…

1. First of all, and this is important, plug in your O2 mobile broadband USB stick.
2. On your Mac, go to System Preferences > Network.
3. Click the + (Create a new service) symbol.
4. Select HUAWEI mobile from the drop down.
5. Enter *99# in the Telephone Number field, leaving Account Name and Password empty.
6. Click Advanced then choose Generic for the Vendor and GPRS (GSM/3G) for the Model. In the APN field enter mobile.o2.co.uk.
7. Click OK.
8. Select Show modem status in menu bar if you’d like to be able to connect easily from the top Mac menu (I find this useful).
9. Lastly, remember to click Apply before leaving the System Preferences screen.

Happy mobile browsing.

This is the Ford Start Concept car recently unveiled at the Beijing Motor Show. Beautiful.

If you’re anything like me and do web development for different sized companies, from small businesses to bigger brands, you sometimes have to live with the hosting choice of the client. If you can avoid it though, I would strongly suggest not using 1and1 - their offering is outdated and support has been widely criticised. There are much better options out there for not much more money such as Bytemark’s virtual machines or The Rackspace Cloud.

So, here’s how to add the Facebook Like button to your Wordpress blog:

That’s it. Well, almost. You need to drop this code into your Wordpress post template (generally single.php) or sidebar.php. The get_permalink tag tells Wordpress to add the current post URL to the Like button.

There are various ways you can customise the button and there’s also a JavaScript version for deeper integration.

This is handy if you have a dynamically generated list (say, coming from a database) and you need to have no padding on a particular list item so that your page layout doesn’t break. Beautiful.

(Note: Be careful how you use it though as it can cause performance issues.)

So you’ll find a decent list of free icons for developers (and any one else for that matter) below. Don’t hesitate to add any others you might know in the comments below.

1. FamFamFam Icons

2. 64 free social media icons

3. Free Social Media Icons Library

4. Crystal Clear

5. 20 Free Social Bookmarking Icons

6. Flavour Extended: The Ultimate Icon Set For Web Designers

7. Social Network Icon Pack

8. Huge Collection of Unique and Beautiful RSS icons

9. Xiao Icon

10. A Set of 10 Free Social Icons

11. Elegant Themes Icon Pack, For Free!

12. Social Media Icons Pack in 3 Sizes for Download

13. Vector Social Media Icons

14. Free Web Application Icons Set

15. Fugue Icons

16. Aquaticus Social Icons

17. 172 final country flag icons

18. Free Web 2.0 Icons Pack

19. Greyscale

20. Sweetie–BasePack (scroll down the page)