Oh my word i am thrilled to hear news of Google's new operating system, coming next year!

I admit it: i'm a Google addict! I've previously said that Google products are like chocolate bars: i always have to try the new ones! I used to be cautious, not wanting Google to follow me all over the internet, so i always logged out quickly. But recently i've thrown caution to the wind! I have fully immersed myself into Google Mail, Chat, Calendar, Docs, Maps and Reader. We use Google apps at work for all our communication needs. I'm considering getting an Android phone and writing apps for it. I basically love Google!

Chrome OS will be a super-speedy operating system (based on the Linux kernel) that will do one thing and do it really well: the web! With a great lightweight browser, the push towards HTML 5, Google Wave, and Google Gears for offline access, everything is pointing to the gap between desktop applications and web apps narrowing, and web apps taking over.

Haha, i just realised, they're finally going to have to write Chrome (the browser) for Linux! Awesome! It's been 9 months i've been waiting for that!

Update – things have moved on since i last checked – you can now download a development version of Chrome as a deb file for Debian and Ubuntu. The install was quick and easy, and it seems to be working pretty well, apart from keyboard shortcuts.

This is a Google world we're living in, and i fully embrace it! :D

Sometimes it's excellent fun to work with somebody to produce a website in a day. With no requirement for ongoing support, just get it up and running, instant gratification. In a way, it says, "Look what we can do when we set our minds to it!"

winchesterwebscene.co.uk

Yesterday, @sydlawrence phoned me to ask if i'd like to help make a new site for the Winchester Web Scene. Without a second thought, i said, "DEFINITELY!" We got together at 3pm today at the Bridge Patisserie. We drank lots of coffee, went on to the Bishop on the Bridge, then went back to Syd's house and ate pizza. We got the whole site designed, coded, integrating with Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, Gravatar and Campaign Monitor for email subscriptions, with a blog plus comments, events list and RSS feeds … in about 5 hours.

It was nice that two Winchester web companies, Marmalade on Toast and Eden Development were able to combine talent to work on a fun social project together. The two of us had a great time making it!

The site gives a far greater prominence to the Winchester Web Scene than the old Ning site did. Still in its first few hours of existence, the site has already had 71 unique visitors. The future of the Winchester Web Scene is looking very bright!

The next event is a barbeque at the Hyde Tavern on the 6th July from 7pm. If you live near Winchester and are interested in anything to do with the web, you're very welcome to come along! :)

With all this talk of Google wanting to buy Twitter, it got me thinking about the exciting potential for real-time searching. I've seen some greasemonkey scripts for adding Twitter search results into Google, but i wanted something a little bit different. I wanted to search multiple places and bring them together in columns. Something a bit like this:

So i spent the whole afternoon figuring out how to do it (and in the process, learning how to do object-oriented PHP!) and you can try it out here: rightnow.aimee.mychores.co.uk

I need help on making it more interactive. It should be fairly easy to define new search locations like plugins. I want people to be able to choose which they wish to search on. I would like AJAX updating with auto refreshing. And of course i need a lot of help with the design!

If you fancy having a play, fork it on Github! github.com/sermoa/right_now_search :)

A GTD tip: When you're sorting things at home and you come across something that should be in a different room, resist the urge to take it there straight away. That disrupts your flow. Instead put it in a pile of things to take to another room, and take them there later.

Perhaps each room should have an inbox in case you know that it needs to be in that room but you haven't decided exactly where yet. Just remember to clear the inboxes as soon as possible!

I have spent the evening wading through piles of documentation and putting it into my new GTD alphabetical filing system. It feels good to have one place for all reference material. I started off analysing everything, putting it into date order, deciding what to throw away, but quickly decided i couldn't manage all that. For the first iteration i have simply been putting things into folders.

I've chosen SimpleGTD.com as my preferred online GTD system. It's really easy to enter actions and move them around and assign them to projects if you want to, but you don't have to. Nicely AJAX-ified to make things faster. For times when i'm offline i have a little notebook to act as an inbox for thoughts until they can go in the online system.

It's pretty cool to see how the online and offline can integrate. My sweet husband placed a £5 off Boots No 7 voucher in my inbox today. I created an action "Use No 7 voucher" under the context "Winchester" and the project "Actionable". In my physical filing system i made a folder called "Actionable" into which i placed the voucher. So when i'm next going into town i can look under the context and remember where to find the voucher!

Well, that's the idea! Let's hope it works! I've always liked the idea of being super organised … just never really known how to do it. I really think GTD might work for me.

How cool is it that i can spend the day doing fun stuff like this and get paid for it?!

This is how ykyat.com looks now!

See – you can comment now!

And you can get RSS feeds!

If you're on Twitter, why don't you join in! It's fun! The hashtag is #ykyat – you know you're addicted to. Think of something you're addicted to, and something that proves it. E.g.

#ykyat your job when you blog all about it!

Or, go on http://ykyat.com and make some comments, or vote up your favourite addictions!

I do love my job! :)

Today was a rather different day at work – when we arrived we learnt that we were going to build a web app in a day! Just for fun! This morning there was no ykyat.com. Now there is! We bought the domain, built the app, registered the Twitter account (@ykyat), got it importing data … oh, it was a lot of fun!

The application scans Twitter to find out what people are addicted to, in the form "You know you're addicted to x when …" It sucks up the tweets, categorises them, lets you vote them up and down.

Being the person with previous experience of the Twitter API it was my responsibility to get the data in and send an @reply to people who use the hashtag #ykyat. My colleagues worked on the models, routes, user interface, interaction, the rating system, and getting it live and working on EC2.

It was great fun all to be working on the same thing together, and the challenge of doing the whole thing in one day! Credit to my colleagues for being so great to work with – it was a bit hectic at times! Huge credit to my boss, @chrismdp for thinking up the idea (yesterday!) conveying it to us, and directing us all to achieve it. I reckon that is pretty impressive!

It looks as if there will be a series on the Eden Development blog about how we did it! :)

Just a little notice to say that i have enabled Disqus on my blog. It's a pretty clever tool that links up comments on blogs all over the Internet. When you hover over the picture of somebody who has commented on my blog, you also see some of the comments they have left on other blogs. You might also see their Twitter status, or get a link to their Flickr account, their Delicious account, their Facebook.

Here's an example of how it can look:

It's a really neat way of bringing the web closer together. For me it's also a great advantage in that it immediately gave me nested comments and the ability to send email replies to people who have commented. I thought i was going to have to make some fairly hefty changes to my WordPress theme in order to enable nested comments, but it turns out Disqus can just do it all for me!

Oh yes, you also get to rate other people's comments up or down, youtube-stylee! ;)

Disqus is particularly good in that it works across multiple blogging platforms. So i installed the WordPress plugin, but there are also plugins for Blogger, Moveable Type, Tumblr and more. Wouldn't it be great if LiveJournal would take it up? :)

Thank you to ChrisMDP for finding Disqus and telling me about it! :)

It worked!!

Generated purely from people around the country sending tweets with their location and marks out of 10 for snow!

I gave a 9/10 for Winchester! It is beautiful soft powdery snow, slightly crunchy under-foot. Wonderful! It's still coming down thick and fast now, and apparently will do all day!

I love how milk deliveries in the UK are always so reliable! They will do their utmost to deliver milk if they possibly can.

Some days Twitter can be such a buzz! What you get out of it is closely correlated to what you put into it, in my experience.

• You're @replying to multiple people having multiple conversations simultaneously.
• You're sending direct message to someone to arrange a meetup.
• You're following a trending topic on twitterfall.com and participating using the hashtag.
• You look at pictures related to the trending topic and make comments on TwitPic.
• You make a blog post, add a link on Delicious, make a comment on 43Things, tick off a task on MyChores, it all gets updated on Twitter.
• You catch onto a meme and help spread it and promote the mashup.

All these things and more have happened to me today! My tweeting activity has earned me 6 new followers, and i started following 2 new people.

In this case the trending topic is #uksnow, and the mashup is benmarsh.co.uk/snow. Make a tweet like this to register your postcode and marks out of ten for snow fall. The map will update automatically!

#uksnow SO23 2/10

The only thing i didn't do today is re-tweet anybody. I still haven't got the hang of re-tweeting. I briefly used Twitterfox which made it easy, but i still prefer to go directly to twitter.com for instant results!

If you feel so inclined, you might like to vote for GitHub as the best bootstrapped startup of 2008 in the Crunchie awards.

I am extremely fond of GitHub and the joy and collaboration it has brought to programming. It is very clever and very useful!