Nick Texidors Test Site

After a 3 year 'recharge break' from my main career in IT & Web development I'm looking at returning for some more technical challenges.

I never really stopped the web development work, I just stopped taking new work on.  Instead I focussed on a new business, some new skills and a bit of fun, while maintaining some selected existing clients, and learning a few new tricks.  No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't pull myself away from the lure of computers and new products. I simply LOVE playing with, evaluating, and making best use of new technology.

So now it's back to the job search sites and looking for some challenging IT work again.

I've decided to put my 1996 Kawasaki Zephyr 750 up for sale in order to fund the purchase of my 'dream' bike.  She's got 72,000km's on the clock, and is in very good condition.  I've owned the bike for about 18months, and in that time, it's only done between 3,000 and 4,000 km's.  It also has a Ventura Rack.

I briefly mentioned Ping.fm in my previous blog entry, but this site caught my interest, and I've been spending some time working on a Joomla 1.5 package that integrates Ping.fm updates with a joomla site.

Basically, Ping.fm can send your message to a whole stack of social networking sites such as Twitter, Plurk (my personal fave), Tumble, Pownce, Facebook etc.  They also have the ability to send the message to a Custom URL. It's utilising this CustomURL that gave me the idea of writing a component that will receive your status messages from Ping.fm, so that even those who don't subscribe to any social networking sites can see what you've been up to.

(Image grabbed from the Ping.fm blog, hope you don't mind guys!)

Social Networking getting you down?  Finding it hard to keep up with all those 'imaginary' or virtual friends?  Well here's another one to add to the list.  Plurk.  Plurk has taken a different approach to Twitter, by displaying messages  on a timeline.  I won't go into too much detail here, you can either head on over to the Plurk website for a look see, OR, you can click the Plurk Icon in the 'Stalk me on' module on the left hand side of this page.

Which leads me on to 'Stalker'.  That's it there, on the left, my very first Joomla module.  For all the details on this plug-in, have a look at the Joomla Modules page.