Want an easier way to add links to Twitter user pages? Here’s a quick solution.

Add the following code to your functions.php file within your theme folder…

add_filter('the_content', 'link_to_twitter');
function link_to_twitter($content) {
    $start=strpos($content,"[@");
    while ($start!=0) {
        $code=substr($content,$start+2,strpos($content,"]",$start)-$start-2);
        $content=str_replace("[@".$code."]",'<a href="http://twitter.com/'.$code.'" target="_blank">@'.$code.'</a>',$content);
        $start=strpos($content,"[@",$end);
    }
    return $content;
}

Now, you simply need to simply specify a Twitter username within square brackets and it will be replaced with the same username, but now with a link to Twitter.

For example, add [@dartiss] to your post and it will display as @dartiss.

Ok, quick catch up. My phone contract expires in a little over 2 months. My supplier – Carphone Warehouse – will be contacting me in a couple of weeks to get out of my contract early if I stick with them and my network (O2). The problem is that I’m after an HTC Hero, which is not available from O2 at Carphone Warehouse.

My plan was to leave it for the contact to expire, then I’ll have my pick of the offers. However, today, I was in the Westfield Centre (Derby) and popped into Phones4U. I had a good look at the HTC Hero (although for a working model, head to the 3 shop!) and I was approached by an assistant. I explained my situation.

Much to my surprise he had a solution – they would pay off my remaining contract if I signed up them. They have the Hero on Orange. For the same price I’m currently paying I could have 1000 free minutes of calls, unlimited texts and unlimited internet¹. It was tempting but I never make a decision there and then.

I popped into Carphone Warehouse to see what they thought! Except… they’ve recalled the HTC Hero. Anyone know why?

Later, back at home I read more on the Sony Ericsson X10. It’s an Android phone which includes an 8.1MP phone and a decent flash. Before my current N95 I owned a Sony Ericsson K800i, and I miss its excellent camera. The X10 sounds ideal – assuming Sony don’t mess it up. Anyway, it’s due early February – just as my contract expires. Nice.

So, I think that’s my plan – wait for the contact to expire and check out the Sony.

Next Day Update:

Carphone Warehouse have an excellent customer support presence on Twitter, so I asked them about the HTC Hero recall. After some checking they got back to me.

The result… there is no recall, and they’ve checked with various other stores and they happily have stock. Hmm. The assistant at this store was quite insistent though that it had been recalled across the company – I wonder why he’d have thought this if it wasn’t the case. It’s not as if he wouldn’t have wanted the sale…

1. which is actually 512MB. Don’t get me started on how they can call this “unlimited”. Besides, most other networks offer 2GB, so this isn’t necessarily a fantastic deal [↩]

Details of the Google Chromium operating system have been sloshed around the internet since they were announced yesterday.

And, you’ll be happy to hear, I’m not going to repeat them.

However, watch the video below (taken from the Chromium website) and, in particular, the last few seconds. Do you see that boot time? And they’re looking at how to get it better. Superb.

One last thing to note – if you haven’t noticed already from some of the press releases – there’s no intention to release this as a package for people to update their existing PCs. Instead, Chromium OS will be supplied to hardware manufacturers for release on new products. This, apparently, is because Google are going to have a strict hardware policy (e.g. only solid state hard drives).