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Many moons ago I wrote an extension to Elgg which allows you to run multiple Elgg sites off of a single install of the codebase.

Following some feedback from the wider world, as well as Elgg’s decision some time ago to move over to github I’ve tidied up the archive and moved it over to github as well.

I have taken the opportunity to perform a provisional migration to support Elgg 1.8, although there are bound to be some outstanding issues. Hopefully this github archive will make collaboration a little bit easier!

Have a play!

» Github Project Page

Thanks for visiting! If you found this helpful, you might be interested in knowing that I offer development and consultancy services, and am available to hire!

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Every time I go shopping I end up with a pocket full of till receipts.

Aside from the few things I buy offline which are business related (as an IT consultant most physical things I buy are bought off the internet) these receipts invariably end up in the bin.

What a waste of paper.

Given that now, in the UK at least, we are largely a cashless society – how hard would it be for these receipts to simply be emailed?

When you sign up for a credit card you could optionally give an email address to which to send the receipts. For individuals this could be your home email address (but of course doesn’t have to be), and for business accounts this could be the address of your accountant – bam, no more hunting down lost till stubs on tax day!

For simple PDQ machines the receipt could be emailed by your card company so there won’t be anything extra to do. All that would be required is to suppress the printing of the customer copy and a little bit of education.

Itemised receipts like the ones you get at Tescos would require a little more work as it’d be the store’s back end process that would do the actual mailing. The email address itself however can easily be stored on the card’s chip and saved along with the receipt in the shop’s back end system for later mailing.

Apple, typically ahead of the curve (not unsurprising given their industry) do this already, but this requires an in store registration process – impractical for anything other than purchasing the occasional big ticket item.

Its now 2012 – why do I still have pockets full of useless bits of paper?

Just a thought.

Image “Receipts galore” by Smaku

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For a little while now I have been using the online todo list Remember The Milk to keep track of the numerous disparate tasks and projects I’ve got going on at any one time.

Using lists, tags and smart searches I’ve managed to not only never lose track of a task. I estimate this has made me about a billion times more efficient, and has reduced stress levels a thousand fold.

Additionally, I use the new and increasingly indispensable ifttt beta to automate a bunch of tasks around the internet; e.g. to grab a copy of Facebook pictures I get tagged in, send me an SMS when the there’s a problem on my girlfriend’s route to work, etc.

Every so often something happens on the internet and, rather than undertaking a specific action, you want to be prompted to undertake some appropriate action. Wouldn’t it be sweet if when these things happened you could have a virtual PA drop a note on your daily todo list?

Twitter to the rescue!

Sadly, Ifttt doesn’t have a Remember the milk channel (yet) but, like many web apps, Remember the milk has a twitter bot. If you add this bot as a friend and associate your RTM account with your twitter account you are able to add things to your task list by sending the bot a direct message.

Ifttt has a twitter task, so all you need to do to add something to your task list when an action is triggered is begin the twitter message with “d rtm”, e.g.

d rtm Write about Latakoo’s latest blog ^today #work

You can use RTM markup in your message to control what list it goes to, set due dates etc.

My standard use case is to prompt me to write a blog post in response to a client updating their blog, or to tell me cover my car’s windscreen when it’s forecast to snow the next day. I’m sure there’s much more you can do with it!