The Blog of Ross C Brown

I have been a Mac computer user now for some five years I’ve got to say the experience has been fantastic bar one little yet highly annoying shortcoming: lack of a labeled hash key on the standard British keyboard layout.  You see, here in the UK we use a currency called the Great British Pound and thus need a key for the pound sign (£).  Now the simplest solution might have been to replace the Dollar ($) key for that of a pound key but that’s not what Apple decided was best.  Instead, us Mac users lose the hash (#) key as to enjoy both the Pound and Dollar keys. [...]

It is often easy to get caught up using organisation-centric language and within your organisation there is often no way around this – sometimes you need to be really specific when describing things. But when it comes to talking to your customers, take a moment to think about the language your customer base is familiar. [...]

For the last hour or so I’ve been reading Martin Lindstrom’s “Buyology”. In his book, Lindstrom details his research into neuromarketing and how science can provide a better insight into our purchasing decisions.

Lindstrom explains that a lot of our purchasing decisions are made subconsciously and that when asked to explain why we purchase something our rational mind takes over and offers up, often weak, justifications for the purchase. In a television interview posted on his website he offers an example where a woman purchases a Louis Vuitton bag. She justifies this purchasing by referencing the bags superior styling and craftsmanship. Aided by a fMRI study, Lindstrom suggests that the purchase was motivated no by superior craftsmanship but by a desire to show the world here newly acquired wealth and by extension status in society. [...]

I’m looking to add ‘content review’ type functionality into WordPress. In in idea would it would work like this:

When authoring a post/page:
The plugin would prompt, by means of a form field, for a content review date. This date will be the date that the content needs to be reviewed for accuracy/relevance. For example 6 Months, 1 year or 5 years after publication.

On the public facing website:
The post meta data would include the review date.

On the content review date for a specific post:
The plugin would send an email to the content/post/page owner prompting them to log into the website, review the content and set a new review date.

Does anyone know of such a plugin that has the above of similar functionality? I’m working on a proposal for a small organization and such functionality would be the cherry on the cake.

If no plugin exists, how difficult would it be to write such a plugin?

This week, another wave of phishing attacks has hit users of popular social networking, and micorblogging weisite, Twitter. Cyber criminals have duped users, celebrities and organizations using Twitter into revealing their log in credentials. Said credentials were then used to spam and dupe more users of Twitter. While there is nothing new about this type of attack, what is particularly worrying is the extent of this particular attack and the media portrayal of the ‘scammers’ and ‘victims’. [...]