Author Archives: ewan

Using the Video Filter module with drupal

If you’re installing the very useful Video Filter module for Drupal, you might get confused like I did by it’s non-functional nature.

It turns out that to enable the module, after you have done the normal step to enable a module in the Administer/Modules page, you then have to go to the Administer/Input Formats page at “yoursite.com/admin/settings/filters” then configure the input formats for “Filtered HTML” and “Full HTML”, where you’ll see a new “Video Filter” option. Check this box, and suddenly you’ll be able to embed a Youtube or other supported website just by putting

[video:url]

in your normal drupal page. Magic!

Why this isn’t included in the minimalistic installation and usage instructions I’ve got no idea.

Using Blackberry Google Talk client to receive twitter notifications instead of SMS

Since Twitter disabled sending SMS messages to you when you receive a new message, I’ve been looking at options for receiving messages on my Blackberry. Twitterberry is fine for reading through the general stream, but it doesn’t to notifications when you get a new message, unlike the Facebook or Google Talk clients for Blackberry.

To work around this issue, I’ve come up with using a twitter-bot called Twitterspy to link my Blackberry Google Talk client to Twitter, mostly following these simple instructions

The steps are dead easy, open Gmail on your PC or Google Talk on your Blackberry, and then select “Add a Friend” in the menu. Enter twitterspy@jabber.org into the field, and hit ok. In a few seconds Twitterspy should appear in your contacts list. Then, open a new conversation with Twitterspy and send “track @yourtwitterid” followed by another message saying “on”. If you ever want to stop receiving messages just send a message of “off”.

Then, anytime someone says your name on twitter you’ll receive a Google Talk notification telling you the message. Clever, isnt it? You can even reply back directly in Google Talk, by following the more detailed instructions again.

Hopefully this will help other people out there too, it works well for me.