Friday roundup: bank holidays, Hackney, URLs

A brief Friday roundup today because I want to go home and start enjoying the bank holiday weekend. After all, everyone on the production desk here has had to do six days' work in just the five days this week so I think we've all earned a rest. And if I haven't been replying to everyone's comments on this here blog with quite my usual alacrity, that's why.

The only recent addition to our blogroll is Baroque in Hackney, which one of our regulars recommended. It's written by a London-based poet and touches on all sorts of topics. And through Baroque in Hackney I've discovered Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog, which quite frankly brings back too many memories of school for my liking but is certainly a labour of love. And what a great title.

I've also added the Tiny URL service to the Engine Room's list of production desk tools (somewhere down on the bottom right of the blog). You've probably come across it before, but it's a way of converting a long URL into a much shorter one. One of the London freesheets uses it occasionally, and I think our magazine is going to start doing the same. After all, it's not practical to print a 360-odd character web address in the magazine. Damn those government websites.

Finally, I'd just like to mention that this week has been easily the busiest in the blog's history – for quite an 'embarrassing' reason. Or should that be 'embarassing'? I'll tell you about it next week.