The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Web development

Andy Mabbett, aka pigsonthewing.

pigsonthewing.org.uk

Freelance Wikipedia, Wikidata and OpenStreetMap consultant and Wikimedian in Residence, from Birmingham, England.

Web developmentSociety / politics / economyGeneral

’10’15’20’25
Posts
154 from 9 Nov 2007 to 11 Mar 2025
Posting
now and then
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://pigsonthewing.org.uk/feed/

2025 1

  1. Developer needed to make Wikidata’s geographical data compatible with GPS tools

2020 2

  1. How Proactively Publishing Publication Dates Could Help Facebook Fight Fake News
  2. Who Has the Keys to Your Online Treasure Chests?

2019 1

  1. Charles N. Mavroyeni’s Hoopoe

2018 1

  1. User Dictionaries – a Fundamental Design Flaw

2017 2

  1. Bromptons in Museums and Art Galleries
  2. Four Stars of Open Standards

2016 2

  1. HASLibCamp
  2. An open letter to Rupa Huq, MP, regarding official Parliamentary videos

2015 5

  1. Documenting public art, on Wikipedia
  2. United Kingdom parliamentary URL structure: change needed
  3. HLF licensing requirement considered harmful
  4. Public Keys in ORCID Profiles
  5. Matching ORCID and other authority control identifiers in Wikidata BEACON

2014 7

  1. Finding ORCID identifiers used in Wikidata & Wikipedia
  2. Using AutoHotKey macros to make typing – and life – easier
  3. It was twenty years ago today…
  4. Wikimedian in Residence at the Royal Society of Chemistry
  5. Whatever happened to Henry Wheeler of Bath: tailor, naval signalman, and Desert Island Discs castaway?
  6. ORCID plugin for WordPress
  7. A reply from the UK government to my request for road gritting open data

2013 9

  1. Help Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons by transcribing small pieces of text
  2. BBC open licences voice samples from radio programmes; ‘Speakerthon’ event invitation
  3. Using IrfanView for image slideshows
  4. What have I been up to, lately?
  5. Trevor Mabbett’s comments on ‘The Man on the Beat’
  6. All your video are belong to us: open licence recordings of local government meetings
  7. Thank you Herkimer Elementary for a Twitter spam case study
  8. For I’m a Jolly Good Fellow (of the RSA)
  9. How may I merge or duplicate Twitter accounts?

2012 25

  1. Teaching OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia editing, Tupperware Party style
  2. My interview, about Wikipedia, with Jamillah Knowles, for BBC Radio 5 Live’s ‘Outriders’
  3. Open Up Your Content – a piece written for Hyperlocal West Midlands
  4. Don’t link to my Twitter profile!
  5. Requesting open-licensed, open-format recordings of the voices of Wikipedia subjects for Wikimedia Commons
  6. How should a hackday be run?
  7. My final three days in Washington DC
  8. Day 10 (Friday) in Washington DC
  9. Day 9 (Thursday) in Washington DC
  10. Day 8 (Wednesday) in Washington DC
  11. Day 7 (Tuesday) in Washington DC
  12. Day 6 (Monday) in Washington DC
  13. Day 5 (Sunday) in Washington DC
  14. Day 3 and 4 in Washington DC
  15. My second day in Washington DC
  16. A few quick thoughts on arrival in Washington DC
  17. The BBC, Regional News and Sport, and Hyperlocal Blogs
  18. The BBC, Open Content and Wikipedia
  19. Idea: A tool to make it easy to subscribe to web-based lists of Twitter accounts
  20. How eBay could help Wikimedia Commons get more open-licensed images
  21. The Prime Minister, Social Media Surgeries and Me
  22. Politician pin ups – open-licensed pictures, please
  23. Lightning Talks Strike Twice
  24. Bullet points from UK Govcamp 2012
  25. Transport Scotland/ ScotRail refuse plaque marking Jordanhill Station as subject of one-millionth Wikipedia article

2011 31

  1. Talking about GLAM, Wikipedia and QRpedia in Amsterdam and Hamburg
  2. Extracting contact data from e-mail signatures
  3. Open-licensing your images. What it means and how to do it.
  4. The BBC’s fundamental misunderstanding of copyright
  5. Can you make a Freedom of Information request via Twitter?
  6. I’ve been appointed ‘Wikipedia Outreach Ambassador’ to ARKive
  7. How can I automate repetitive find’n’replace operations?
  8. Talking about Pink Floyd at Thinktank Planetarium
  9. Tips for Unconference newbies
  10. My interview about Wikipedia, with BBC WM’s Carl Chinn
  11. Wi-Fi checklist for unconference or hack-day organisers
  12. An open letter to Iain (M) Banks: please give Twitter a try
  13. The 9th and 10th QR Code commandents
  14. Poll: To at or not to at?
  15. Dan Slee, me, HyperLocal Govcamp West Midlands, BrewCamp, and cake
  16. Google Books: please make better use of screen space on my netbook
  17. Unusual behaviour of Blue Tit at nest site
  18. The mysterious case of Birmingham’s missing Victorian cast iron urinal
  19. Alan Sugar, Digby Jones and me, in the Daily Express
  20. Improving the already excellent ‘Twitter Blackbird Pie’ WordPress plugin
  21. Syndicating Customisable Hyperlocal Blog Content
  22. Making a Difference to My Career
  23. HashMash: My invention of a new hashtag search tool
  24. My name is Andy Mabbett, and I’m a Hyperlocal blogger
  25. Response to consultation on an open data standard for information about public toilets
  26. Portrait with Brompton Bike
  27. Fixing Facebook’s Microformats (at their request)
  28. Do you make comments on others’ blogs? Bookmark and share them!
  29. This weekend was indistinguishable from magic
  30. A proposed tag for including Wikipedia links in Twitter posts
  31. Proposal: generate KML from postcodes in Twitter messages

2010 19

  1. Don’t confuse your social media channels
  2. Sharing images openly is better than uploading to single sites
  3. Everything at your postcode – proposal for a new website
  4. Proposed citation microformat: better than COinS metadata
  5. An open letter to Facebook, about their broken microformats
  6. Open local public spending data – a potential hitch
  7. More police forces should publish web pages about wildlife crime officers
  8. I can teach HTML. Well.
  9. Google Maps’ microformats: unhappy anniversary – still broken after three years
  10. Hello world!
  11. Overdue measurement microformat: useful for radio station frequencies
  12. The Highway Code should be available as a set of linkable HTML documents, not just PDFs
  13. Ian Emes’ ‘French Windows’ and Pink Floyd’s ‘One of These Days’ at Ikon
  14. Guardian asks National Secular Society to comment on the ordination of women priests
  15. Please Help Me to Compile a List of UK Police Forces’ Wildlife Crime Pages
  16. My Open Data Challenge to UK Local Government: a Wikipedia Page for Every Council
  17. When writing about the web, links are required
  18. Lists in Microformats: Suggested Optimisation
  19. BBC Balloon Release Complaint

2009 11

  1. Manu Sporny recommends me on LinkedIn
  2. Twitter: A microformat in lieu of a protocol
  3. Bacchus Bar, Birmingham. Awful.
  4. Machine Tagging Flickr
  5. I am not a Twitcher!
  6. Triple-tag references to Twitter posts
  7. Poorly lawnmower
  8. Twitter: canonical URLs and Protocols
  9. Dates and coordinates in HTML5
  10. 25 things about Andy Mabbett
  11. How microformat developments are blocked

2008 26

  1. Wine REPugnant
  2. Winterval – the truth
  3. RIP, Richard Wright
  4. Birmingham Post and Flickr images
  5. (Bus) stop this madness!
  6. Triple tags on Twitter
  7. Bunkum & Quislings
  8. This one's for you, Adrian
  9. Marking up the scientific names of living things
  10. Come friendly bombs and fall on Birmingham Central Library
  11. hAccessibility: BBC drop hCalendar microformat
  12. Spotted Mimics
  13. Stupid, Stupid BBC!
  14. What would my grandfathers have said?
  15. Surface Unsigned: to be avoided
  16. Unknown Beethoven symphony discovered!
  17. Daughters of Albion review
  18. ch-ch-changes
  19. hAccessibility – Unhappy First Birthday
  20. Google Reader's great, but it could be even better
  21. Facebook should allow groups to be rationalised
  22. Spatial references to page layout considered harmful
  23. Taxonomic machine tags
  24. Suggested method of publishing microformats in Twitter posts
  25. BigSight: No Foresight; BigMistake
  26. Free music, courtesy of your library

2007 12

  1. Cards are barking up the wrong Christmas Tree
  2. More Nokia N95 (and Opera Mini) wishes
  3. It's hardly rocket science…
  4. Who do you work for, again?
  5. Now tell me that moths aren't pretty!
  6. Oops
  7. Wanted: proof reader
  8. Children in need of some logic
  9. A Right Charlie
  10. Leaf on bars
  11. Floating Leaf
  12. Nokia N95 fails to geo-tag pictures