With the move to a new ISP for our multimedia, blogs and forums, came the opportunity to dig into some of the inner workings of our web sites.

By inner workings I mean re-learning the proper format for a cron job to call PHP and Ruby scripts, digging through thousnads of PHP classes to actually get the Blogs to work and checking and rechecking permissions on all sorts of folders that were mixed up in the move.

But, on the positive side it was also an opportunity to update some processes and add a few small things.

So - not that anyone asked - but two cool things:

1) Our breaking news blog has been updating our Twitter feed for a few months using a little PHP script. But - that was originally set up before Twitterfeed.com had launched, so we switched over to that. it is not as flaxible as running the code ourselves - but it is easier.

2) We have been looking for a way to update our Facebook page with local news - and to date have been importing notes from an XML feed That is not a great solution as most people do not receive a feed of their friends notes - so the updates are basically invisible. Luckily - we came across a nifty Ruby script that solves the problem. Now - whenever we update breaking news - it feeds to Twitter which in turn updates the Telegraph's status on our FB page.

Using those same tools i am also feeding updates from this blog to my personal Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Not sure if this is progress, but it definitely is going to reduce the number of places I need to update to alert people to news and blog items.