It seems even my site has fallen victim to those dreaded cruncy credits, and I've been forced to cut back on the length of my URLs. It's all down to those jerks on Capitol Hill, I tell ya.

My shiny new CMS - the one that powers this site and Deadlink, my podcast - has a cute little URL-shortener that goes with it. The CMS is named Dolphy (after American jazz saxophonist Eric Dolphy) and its shortener is dlfy.me. I was quite surprised to find a cheap four-letter domain still available in 2010.

You may be aware that it's very, very easy to write a URL shortener, hence why there's so many of them about. In my opinion the only things that distinguish them are their ease of use, whatever API they provide which allows them to work with apps like TweetDeck or other websites, and of course the number of characters in the shortened URL.

Well, my service is easily integrated into my CMS using a filter (a Django templating device), like wp.me (WordPress' service) it's intended only for use with the CMS so it has no public API, and its URLs are 20 characters long, which is pretty good going.

To build one yourslef, you simply need a short domain name, and a function in whatever language you prefer, that can create a random string of text (numbers, letters and URL-safe characters like hyphens and underscores) of a certain length, save that string to a database alongside the long URL, then match the two up when the user visits the URL containing your random jumble of letters and numbers.

The only other consideration is making sure you won't run out of character combinations. One way to dramatically increase that number is by using both upper- and lowercase characters. It's not strictly standards-compliant, but everybody does it! However, there's nothing stopping you using sequential numbers instead of a string of text, but it does kind of give away the number of records in your database... it's up to you if that matters.

Why do celebrities think they can use Twitter just the way they want to? Don't they know they've a public duty to entertain us for free and should use social networks to do so? And shouldn't we reserve our right to block them when they start demanding money like petty beggars?

Gaaawwwd that felt good... and is incidentally not at all what I think. There are lots of problematic buzzwords there, least of all "celebrity". But there is a question - at least in my mind - about how people who are well-known and well-liked use Twitter. Not for our benefit, but for their own.

Chris Unitt has pointed out to me before that it is unwise and unfair to dictate how people should use Twitter, and I'd never want to do so. But when browsing the pages of the well-known or looking through their tweets as they pass through my stream, it seems a shame that so many of them are directed at their fellow well-known...alites. Or something. (I feel loath to use the word "celebs" as it just conjures up images of Jordan and Peter for me.)

When I aired this view, Pete Ashton came back with a good point (above). And I think that's certainly true when starting out on a new social network. You've got to build up your base from the people you already know and whose thoughts you think you'd enjoy. A thought echoed by Martin:

But when the number of people who follow you outweighs the number you follow by a ratio of 150:1, isn't it then time to look at a few of those tweets and see if you find them interesting?

OK it's hard when you're being flooded by a surge of incoming emails - or you've turned Twitter's follower notifications off because your'e getting swamped - but from time to time I feel bad because I don't follow many of the people who follow me, so imagine that magnified so many times over.

This doesn't come from a place of "I followed X but X never followed me back". Not at all. Stephen Fry followed me when I followed him, but I've had nothing of any use to say to him; he was just doing what he thought was right, but was probably not in his best interests. And that's the key, it's about one's own interest.

I'm not suggesting One Way to use Twitter so that all the little people get to chat to the Big People [shudder], but I do wonder how nice it would be if some of the people who get stuff out of it, could put back into it. For their own benefits, and for the benefit of their network.

I don't know if things have changed in the last year or two, but I remember that the cheif reason people scoffed at Twitter was because they tried it for a week, failed to follow anyone other than the account they'd seen in the news article they themselves were aping, then left. It's failure to stray outside your comfort zone that can lead to an unsatisfactory time on Twitter, and that's why I think it would be valuable if you had a glance once in a while at your list of followers, to see if the people who've made an investment in you are worth making an investment in, in return. If they're not, pass them by. And do it for your own sake, not because I wrote too many words on a Tuesday evening.

_{* In fact I know that they haven't changed that much in two years, 'cos Ricky Gervais was party to the same misconception}

If your'e familiar with the Dave Gorman Show on Absolute Radio, and its related podcast, you'll no doubt be aware of Pun Street and its related side roads Fail Lane and Charming Alley.

It's a collection of shops whose names are either delightfully pun-laden, woefully under- or overthought, or just very pleasant.

Well, partly to show off the new mapping thing what I built into my CMS (that allows me to easily add locations, then drop in a map with a simple shortcode) and partly 'cos I'm like that, I thought I'd put the ones I could find on a map. Here it is.

Embed this map

I've not been able to find all of them - Halal, is it Meat You're Looking For still alludes me - so if you can point me in the direction of a Google Map address for any that I've missed - only ones that have been mentioned on the show, please! - then feel free.

Deadlink is a podcast set during the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse. It starts Phil Davis, Lyndsey Michaels and me, with regular contributions from Richard Summerfield and a number of guests.

In each episode we try and find objects with which to rebuild humanity or fight off the encroaching hoards of the undead. It's a very different take on the usual "banter" programme, with a narrative thread and an eerie undertone.

It's pretty funny in places too.

There's plenty of places for listeners to join in, by voting for a new leader, and sending questions and comments, via email to deadlinkpodcast@googlemail.com or through Twitter, where we are @deadlinkpodcast. We're also on Facebook, naturally.

You can subscribe via iTunes and RSS, and find all the rest of the info at deadlinkpodcast.com.

The first episode will be available at 8am, so if you like the sound of an alternative comedy podcast, subscribe now! You almost certainly won't regret it.

In a previous post I talked about the arc my opinion of comedian Richard Herring has taken over the past year or so. Well, its trajectory continues as last night I finally caught his Hitler Moustache show.

I'd said to my friend Lizzie that I was either going to leave the show wondering how this unsung hero of comedy hasn't had more apparent success, or have that first question unequivocally answered. Well, while I didin't quite think Herring an unsung hero who deserved to be right back on the telly, I did wonder why he was still playing small venues like the Glee club with a show of this quality.

It was utterly brilliant. Obviously funny, and predictably tinged with political sentiment; devoid of lazy jokes and portrayed with real emotion. I ended up at the end of the show liking him - as a person, not just as a comedian - more than I expected. While I still can't say I like the character he portrays on his podcasts, I warmed to the on-stage Herring. Maybe it's just something that's lost in the visual performance, although it's not a visually heavy show... I don't know.

I was a bit torn between waiting to meet him and have my programme signed - something he said he was happy to do - but I don't know what I would've said. "I used to hat eyou, but now I think you're ace"? Prob'ly not.

Another thing in the show's favour is that it inspired me to see more live comedy in smaller, more intimate venues, but the odds of finding a show which is as good value as Hitler Moustache would be slim I think.

He doesn't look to be playing birmingham again for the moment, but if you can pop up to any of his other shows, do it; it's really worth it.

I'll say right off the bat that I'm not a PHP fan. It's ugly and its only good point is its seeming ease to learn. I think this is a fallacy, as I'll try to explain. If you're not a programmer I'll try and make as much sense as I can.

Facebook has launched a new project, HipHop for PHP. Born out of a mammoth hacking session, it attempts to rewrite the core source code of PHP to make it speedier and more robust. A noble, but to my mind pointless task, as that's not the problem that PHP really suffers from. In my opinion, it's just outdated. I'm also a little disconcerted with the opening gambit from the project's Facebook page. Here it is in full; I'll break it down bit-by-bit to try and explain why I think it's wrong.

As a programming language, PHP is simple. Simple to learn, simple to write, simple to read, and simple to debug. We are able to get new engineers ramped up at Facebook a lot faster with PHP than with other languages, which allows us to innovate faster.

I should state off the bat that the developers behind this project are obviously more experienced, and most probably more intelligent - and better coders - than me (and I say that without a sneer and without irony), but that doesn't make them right about PHP. This is why (the points are taken from the quote above, and relate to PHP as a scripting language):

PHP is "simple to learn"

No. Basic, Python and Ruby are simple to learn because they're simple to read. (We'll get onto that in a bit.) The more readable a language is, the easier it is to understand and learn. The more consistent the syntax, the quicker the repetition takes hold and familiarity sets in. PHP does not have consistent syntax. (See below.)

PHP is "simple to write"

No. The statement "x = 1 + 2" which could be written the same in Python and Ruby (and similarly, with a small caveat in Basic) is written in PHP as "$x = 1 + 2". OK, not that different, but longer to type because of the dollar sign, which needs two keystrokes, breaking the flow of typing.

Attaching one string to another (where a string is a piece of text) is done in well-considered languages by using the + sign, because that makes sense. Some, like Basic use the & sign, which also makes sense. But in PHP, you use a full stop. That's down to lazy language design, in my opinion. That doesn't make it easy to learn or easy to write, because you have to have that unintuitive rule in place in your mind when you type.

PHP is "simple to read"

God no. PHP is traditionally used in web pages, and like ASP - easier to read than PHP but just as outdated - where the code is mingled and mangled together with the HTML. Yes there are frameworks that separate the two out, but many template frameworks - things like WordPress for example - still use heavy blocks of PHP. And when most (but not all) people talk about PHP, they're talking about it "raw", with nothing built on top.

Even a standard block of PHP with no other elements is difficult to read, because of the inconsistent syntax and unnecessary extra characters. When you're glancing through a script trying to get its gist, dollar signs can look like Ss, commas can look like full stops, and curly brackets can be confused with non curly brackets (the two types of bracket having two separate meanings). That last point is true of C and its descendants (C++, C#, ActionScript and JavaScript), so it's not a deal-breaker.

PHP has a nice facility for injecting variables (pieces of information held in memory) right into strings, without having to join them together using the full stop. But you can only do that if you use the right quote marks. Why? Python can do it either way, as (I think) can Ruby. C# and Visual Basic use a function to do it, but in all these cases the rules are consistent.

PHP is "simple to debug"

That depends on what you think of as "debugging", and your definition of "easy". To some, that could mean loading and reloading a page, making tiny tweaks to code until they see the desired effect. In others, like C#.NET and VB.NET, it's done by "stepping through" each line of code at a time, so you can see the exact state of play before an error or unexpected action occurs. In other languages or frameworks you can test your code in a console (a terminal window where you type commands and get quite responses).

PHP pretty much just deals with the first case, and that's only if the host or computer you're using has turned error reporting on (which isn't done by default). If not, you don't see any error messages, just (in some cases) a blank white page.

I'm trying to compare like for like as much as I can here, so as not to be unfair to PHP. It's not a framework, in the same way that Ruby on Rails is. But as a language, Ruby is fair superior (Rails is the framework that is built ontop of Ruby, to make it work on the Web).

I think PHP still exists because it's used by Facebook and WordPress and a few others that haven't yet got round to updating their codebase. I know that's a little trite and if you're a pure PHP guy I'm sorry to insult your religion - please shout at me in the box below - but I really think it's time we put it out to pasture. I don't think there's a place for it in the modern Web, even with the frameworks that exist to hide its sloppy workings and ill-considered design. It goes against the things we praise other developers for: keeping code separate, using object orientation (if you're unfamiliar, it's something PHP hasn't which almost all other languages have).

I care about the Web. And I don't want to make it harder for people to develop for and play with it either. I'm not interested in pulling the ladder up after me so that all the people with the intelligence and desire - but not the knowhow - to develop, have to come to me to develop for them. I get really excited when people tell me they're learning Django or even Rails, because I think "that's great; there's another one who's doing it right". I want the Web to be filled with really well-built things, not stuff "knocked up" in 5 minutes 'cos it was quicker. I get why that's done, I just can't understand why it's not worth taking the time to do it better.

But maybe I'm just elitist. Or a zealot. Or a code snob. Or an unsung hero to the masses? Almost definitely not the last one, but I'll let you decide. Feel free to tear me a new one in your comments.

One of the most frequent complaints about the Apple iPad is that it can't run more than one application at once, or allow you to easily switch between them. In short, it can't "multitask". But that's not strictly true is it? Certainly if the iPhone is anything to go by.

When we think about multitasking, it's important to ask what that really means. Is it a question of processors working on lots of jobs - graphics, input/output, memory management - at the same time, or is it one of use? I don't think it's the former, as that's little more than a techie concern, so it must be the second.  And that's where I disagree that the iPad lacks multitasking.

Because the iPad runs the iPhone operating system, it's able to play music from its iPod app and Safari, while you do other things. Those "other" things can mean reading messages, browsing the web or playing games that don't require sound.

Also, if you're viewing a web page and you want to do something else, once you've finished that other task, go back into Safari and the page you were looking at is right there where it was. Granted, if you skip out of a game to answer a text message you may lose your place, but loads of games offer the facility to resume from where you left off.

So while this isn't "true" multitasking in the technological sense, I think it reasonably reflects the human approach. If you think about it, how often do you actually do two things at once? When you "multitask", aren't you just putting one job on hold for a moment, while you do another one? Very rarely will you be chopping veg with the left hand and ironing your jeans with the right. You put one job on hold while you attend to the other. The same is true of the iPhone and iPad.

Multitasking for the everyday man is a brain thing, not a tech thing.

I've just seen something in my Twitter stream that makes me fearful. Not in any real, drastic sense, but it gives me a sense of FFSitis nonetheless. It also made me think about privacy on Twitter, and what it means for relationship with our friends.

I've just been sent a spam message by a bot whose sole purpose was to send just me just that message. Not anyone else. Just me. Not that I'm being singled out for special treatment you understand, the name of the bot clearly denoted it was generated and given an account either by virtue of a clever piece of software that's circumvented Twitter's CAPTCHA, or created an account in a sweatshop where people are paid a pittance to destroy the Internet, slowly and with the poor grammarz.

We've already seen "games" (which aren't games, just in the same way that those paper fortune tellers we made as kids aren't really games) on Twitter, but in a way they're harder to avoid than the ones on Facebook. Because Facebook's privacy is a lot more granulated than Twitter's, you can cut out that part of a person that you find maddening - the part that somehow believes that inviting all their friends to play Pirates vs Aliens or whatever, will somehow make their lives better - and leave the bits you enjoy. Whereas if you block someone in anger because they've invited you to become mayor of an Arkansas backwater or asked you to read their every blog post - sometimes twice for each post - you'll lose the stuff you find interesting, enlightening or just friendly. (And yes, I did just tweet this post. *slap*.)

Twitter's simplicity makes it capable of great things, but that lack of granularity makes it vulnerable, and makes me ever more certain that there will be a replacement, one with the immediacy and flexibility of Twitter, but with tighter controls or better tagging. What form that'll take I have no idea, but I'm not convinced it's an add-on or another skin to the Twitter API.

And in time, that too will become susceptible to a bot that offers me a "free prize". I still haven't clicked the link in that tweet. Who knows, maybe it's an iPad and I've just missed out?

Nah. S'probly just porn.

I've just finished listening to the CarPool episode featuring Richard Herring, which is probably where my story ends. I've had an odd and complete turnaround in opinion of the man, which all began over a year ago.

I've been a subscriber to the Collings and Herrin podcast since late 2008, despite having never really enjoyed it up until recently. The problem I had with it - and still have to a certain extent - is that, I thought I knew what podcasts were and should be, and this podcast does almost everything "wrong". It doesn't have its own website, it's really badly recorded and there's little attention paid to the audio quality or production value. There's no simple line of communication to get in touch, and no format.

Apparently that's wrong. Apparently what you're supposed to do, is the opposite of those, like what I did. I put time, effort, sweat and stress into my first series of podcasts back in early 2008, and have toiled over Back of the (Inter)net to play my part to the best of my ability. But in reality, these things matter little. OK, programmes need to be audible, ordered and available easily, but every other aspect pales into insignificance if the content isn't good (I'm making no comparison content-wise with BOTIN, the podcast I produced for Richard Summerfield and Phil Davis).

Despite never really being offended by anything Herring said, I really didn't like him. I'd enjoyed Fist of Fun as a kid, and respected his transparency in the podcast (listeners heard the ideas behind his latest show, Hitler Mustache before the show had been written, and were often treated to thoughts and ideas which were later firmed up into a script), but I just didn't like him all that much.

But it had nothing to do with his "output", to use a generic phrase. It was because I thought I was playing by the rules of podcasting, and he wasn't. It wasn't jealousy, it's just the very nature of being a reluctant pedant (ie: a pedant who knows it's wrong to be a pedant, but can't help it).

You might know that I ran a podcast review site for a bit, in-between (unpaid) podding work, in which I slated his and Andrew Collins' oeuvre. This is the classic mistake made by those who are frustrated that, for one reason or another they can't do the thing they love, so they critique others' work instead of creating their own.

So although not jealous, I was probably a little bitter. Then I heard As it Occurs to Me, Herring's solo project, enjoyed it and looked forward to each weekly installment. In-between that, I'd heard - as many of us had - a lot about him through coverage in the press, and his interviews by way of rebuttal, and come to have a lot of respect for the man and his views, to the point at which I now really want to see his show.

It's odd how hubris can cloud one's judgment, but in many respects Collings and Herrin know a lot more about podcasting than I do. Now, as I move into my own hopefully formative and exciting project, I have a greater understanding of the importance of just being funny and entertaining. Yes I want it to sound good and be interactive and packed full of little extras 'cos that's what I'm into, but it's the on-mic talent, not the edited slickness that will make or break it.

The Collings and Herrin podcast is a shambles, but what has come out of it (Herring's tour and solo podcast) is brilliant, and if in my project - which starts at the end of Feb; charge your iTunes engines now - can achieve some of that, I'll be a very happy man.

Web app of the week

Readability, a site with a handy bookmarklet that formats large chunks of text to your liking.

Starting to use Readability quite a lot for long articles and posts http://bit.ly/4laqxz

Tweeted by Joanna Geary

Quote of the week

"You want me to spend my child's inheritance, putting porridge on that guy's face?"

Jon Richardson, the Jon Richardson podcast

Biggest thing to happen this week

I decided, with some friendly cajoling to run the Birmingham Sport Relief Mile:

"it may not be a run, it may not even be a jog, but god dammit I was going to do something. So I entered. I’m doing a mile. Imagine my surprise."

Read the full blog post

Other bits

• Song of the week: Fyfe Dangerfield - She Needs Me
• Toy of the week: WordPress MU
• This week's top achievement: making Metalocal editable by the public