yours2share - sharing stuff & collaborative consumption » webstuff

Facebook – sharing websites

sophie — Wed, 25 May 2011 16:23:33 +0000

I’m developing a list of all the websites related to sharing I know about on yours2share’s Facebook page. As you’ll see sharing and collaboration take many forms including:

private syndicates
peer to peer rental
rental
swapping
getting rid of stuff that is no longer wanted
peer to peer lending

This is a work in progress. If you know of a service that isn’t mentioned, please let me know.

Facebook Fans

sophie — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:26:38 +0000

After much fiddling last night, I managed to get the Facebook fan box into the widget on my blog. So now you can sign up to be a fan of the yours2share page on Facebook. Please do!

Just click “Become a fan”.

Facebook has improved greatly recently, it used to drive me mad every time I touched it. You’d see something one day, go back the next and find it impossible to get back to that interesting section. I’ve not had that sensation for about six months, but yesterday as I was amending the page, I saw the link to the fan box. I did a little more work on the page, and went back to find the Fan Box. I went round and round in circles.

In the end I Googled and found this great explanation of how to set up the Fan Box. The link I was looking for was buried in the page.

All of a twitter

admin — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 11:14:55 +0000

I think I’ve found another wonderful displacement activity – twitter. I’ve been putting off joining for ages, because I should be doing lots of other important things: sales, trademarking yours2share, my accounts, newsletters, pitching ideas to TV companies. But fiddling around with more software is always enticing.

I’ve worked out how to feed my tweets into this blog, now I’ve got to do the same for Facebook and maybe the main yours2share website.

So if you want to follow my every thought on the things I should and will be doing as soon as I’ve sorted out the Facebook feed, then Follow me on twitter.

Improving yours2share’s website: Romanian style

admin — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:39:08 +0000

Earlier this week, yours2share’s website underwent a fairly major set of improvements. I’ve been working on these for about five months and I can’t tell you how relieved I am that they have been implemented with relatively few issues arising. (I can’t believe I’ve just written that, I left a full time job in IT two and a half years ago, and I’m still conditioned to rephrase problems and bugs as issues!)

The underlying software of yours2share is coded in perl. Had I known three years ago how hard it is to find perl coders I probably wouldn’t have gone down this route. But you live and learn. Most perl experts in the UK appear to work on contract for specialist IT companies and their rates are, well, interesting.

I wasn’t too enthusiastic about getting major software development done on-line but I had to find another way. I’ve been working with my developer in Romania for five months and I’m impressed.

I’ve never spoken to him: our communication is entirely by email and Google chat. If I’d realised this at the outset, I’d have been even more rattled, but it works well and one fantastic aspect is that both he and I have a record of everything we have discussed so misunderstandings are much reduced. He types faster, better English than me when we chat on Google. The only downside of using Google chat is that long sessions are exhausting.

Working “alongside” him on Monday night reminded me of many previous “go live” implementations in my previous life. It was like having one of the many excellent IT contractors I’ve worked with over the years sitting next to me.

So what have we done?

yours2share remains free to use and I want to keep it that way. But people can now pay extra if they wish to make their ad stand out, or put their contact details onto it

Ads are sorted by the date last updated, which I hope will encourage people to come back and keep their ad up to date, and ads can now be viewed in the currency of the visitor’s choice – my American members will like this.

There are Googlemaps within each ad showing the location and the search function is greatly improved – the old search functionality used to drive me mad. Finally we’ve improved the security on the validation process.

WordPress: disasters to doddles

admin — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:57:47 +0000

It’s funny how the things you dread often turn out to be dead easy when you finally do them and the things you expect to be a doddle, turn into a disaster.

Last week on the fourth attempt I finally set up phpmyadmin so that my developer can access only the database for yours2share and not the whole of the yours2share control panel. phpmyadmin is a great piece of software, used by everyone, so I thought this would be easy. No. The worst instructions I’ve ever seen. In the end I manually configured the config file based on the config file a friend sent me. I would never have put the right information into the right boxes in the so-called wizard, the labels were completely misleading.

This frustrating process didn’t enthuse me for my next bit of software fiddling, upgrading WordPress, the software behind this blog. Everything I’ve ever upgraded up until now has been messy, even nightmarish, so I’ve been putting this off. I finally decided I had to do this because I’ve been helping some friends set up WordPress websites and they are all in the newer version. I’ve been getting into a muddle as the admin screens have a different layout – it’s all very well when I’m working it out by myself, but I’ve ended up giving phone tutorials to newbie bloggers and it doesn’t look clever when I’m hunting around for the right section.

I’d read the blurb and it didn’t instill confidence, even though WordPress is used by so many people. Then I found the WordPress Automatic Update Plugin. It sounded good, but it’s still a beta. Then I saw 47,000 people had already downloaded it, and thought, “what the hell”.

Wow, it works. Really really well. Congratulations to Keith Dsouza. So well I’m almost considering making a donation.

New blog (with all the old posts)

admin — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:26:30 +0000

Welcome to the new yours2share blog, which has all the old postings from the old blog but is now a fully fledged self hosted WordPress.org blog rather than a WordPress.com blog which is rather like a second class citizen.

I’ve begun to promote the blog on Feedburner, Technorati etc and realised that there are so many things that only work properly if at all on the self hosted version such as StatCounter and Share This

Fortunately migrating from wordpress.com to selfhosted wordpress is relatively easy. You can export all your posts and comments out and import them into the new blog. But I still had to edit my accounts with Feedburner, Technorati, Zimbio and few other places. As I hadn’t been going that long it wasn’t too bad, but having realised my mistake I decided it was better to move as soon as possible.

So my advice for anyone thinking about a wordpress blog is go for self hosted, particularly if you already have a hosting set up.

Facebook badge

yours2share — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:30:58 +0000

In the earlier post, I should have explained how I added the Facebook badge that appears further down this page.

Click here and all will be explained. I’ve actually tried to work out how to arrive at this page through the normal user interface, and given up. But then it’s Facebook.

Those who help yours2share

yours2share — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:45:30 +0000

As I indicated on an earlier post, I’ve had help creating and running yours2share from a huge variety of sources. Over the last couple of days I’ve been using two websites that I’ve come to rely on for entirely different types of support.

The first is Sitepoint which is an enormous forum for webmasters and anyone building a website. I’ve had endless help from here, finding freelancers on their marketplace, reviewing yours2share, researching software, and just finding answers to those endless pesky issues that continually crop up. There are several big websites like this, but what marks Sitepoint as different is the attitude of the experienced experts that answer your pleas for help. I’ve only had really good constructive advice, even if I later realise I was asking a rather daft question. Some sites can be downright nasty to people who are still learning about the web.

The second website I visit regularly for useful tips and a dollop of helpful optimism is Enterprise Nation. This a support website for home workers. Every time I visit I find something helpful, today I learnt how to add the link to Facebook that you’ll see on the blog below.

As I finish writing this, I realise that the reason I think of these websites together is that they are both kind and generous, something that isn’t as common on the web as it should be.

Thank you Fuzioned

yours2share — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 13:07:36 +0000

This is simply a very big thank you for Colin at Fuzioned for helping me out over the last few days.

Some strange things occured last week and I began to wonder if the website had been hacked. However detailed investigation by Colin and me has shown no evidence of this and we think now that there was probably simply an odd set of coincidences that caused the problems.

I couldn’t have worked this out for myself and Colin rang me from home on the 2^nd January when he was having one of his few days off a year. I completely forgot that the 2^nd January is a major bank holiday in Scotland – the Scots require two days to recover from New Year’s Eve and if you’ve ever experienced Hogmanay north of the border, you’ll know why!