Category: Technology

I’ll be writing more in a week or two

If you’ve been reading this blog from my web page at www.rynosoft.com/mick, you may have noticed that I’ve been reorganizing things over there. I have been consolidating links to all of the articles there onto a single page, which is available from the “Archive” link on my web page or from the “Archive” link in the “All Things Mick” section on the left side of this page. When I’ve finished putting all the links on the Archive page, the web page at www.rynosoft.com/mick will cease to exist.

I’m doing this because everything I write these days is on my blog and I write very few, if any, website pages any more. I want to keep the old stuff around and I think a single page archive linking to all the old articles is a good way to keep it available without having to maintain the labyrinthian structure of the website as I envisioned it back when I first started it in 1996.

So what does this all mean for you, the reader? You now have a couple of options for viewing my blog:

  1. Replace your www.rynosoft.com/mick bookmark(s) with a bookmark to www.rynosoft.com/blog in your web browser. If you want to view old articles, use the Search field (for blog content) or the Archive link on the left (for older content).
  2. Subscribe to an RSS feed to this blog with your favorite aggregator. I use a dedicated reader called NetNewsWire but Safari, which is free and available for Windows and Mac, also has a fine built-in reader. If neither of those options is appealing, Internet Explorer 7 has a built-in reader (or so says Wikipedia) and I hear that Google Reader is an excellent web-based solution. If you’d like to do your own research, you can start with Wikipedia’s fairly comprehensive list of aggregator clients. WordPress, the wonderful software that powers this blog, supports atom, RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF) and RSS 0.92 feeds. You can also click the “RSS” link at the bottom of the page to subscribe to this blog.
If the second option sounds totally technical and incomprehensible, I apologize. However, you should be using RSS even if my blog is the only blog you read. RSS makes web browsing faster and easier by doing all of the mundane work for you. You can expect a future article here explaining all about RSS: what it can do for you and how to use it. If you don’t want to wait, check out some of the links above.

Tools for Twitterers

The popularity of Twitter has led to the creation of some great services that work with the “social networking” website. Because Twitter has a public API and makes the “tweets” (Twitter-speak for a message posted on Twitter) available to anyone, it’s easy for web developers to tap into this resource. Here are a few that I’ve found useful:

  • Twitterholic ranks twitter users according to the number of followers each user has. I follow several people on that list include Barack Obama, John Gruber, Wil Wheaton and Warren Ellis. You can also use Twitterholic to view your own history of people following you. Here’s mine.
  • TwitterLocal lets you find Twitter users in your geographical area. You can view the list of local users on the Twitterlocal website or you can subscribe to an RSS feed. They also track the top 30 locations for Twitter users in the world. Portland is currently ranked 15th only 6 spots below “Right here.”
  • TweetClouds processes all the tweets for a given user and then creates a tag cloud for that user. If you’ve tweeted for as long as I have, it takes awhile for TweetClouds to process all your tweets, but they provide you with a static link that you can pass around to people afterwards that allows for delay-free viewing of your tweeting psyche. Here’s one I generated as I wrote this. I am evidently obsessed with “time” and “watching”.
  • Quotably provides context for Twitter conversations by showing them as threaded discussions. If you glance at the Quotably page for my tweets, you’ll see people who reply to me as well as anybody to whom I might have replied. I use this when I see people I follow replying to people whom I don’t follow.
  • Twitter itself provides a range of “badges” that let you display your tweets on your web page, Facebook account, Myspace account and others. If you look on the left of this page, you’ll see that mine displays my three most recent tweets.
That’s just a few of the tools that are available. Googling “twitter tools” reveals that there are many, many more out there. This article has a pretty good list.

Join Twitter

It’s difficult to describe what Twitter does because it lacks a close analog in the “real” world.

The term social networking gets bandied about a bit too often these days. Most internet veterans probably cringe at the mention of websites like FaceBook or MySpace, two of the pioneers of the genre. Although it’s likely that those sites are so disregarded amongst the professional class of internet users simply because they consider such sites to be “beneath them,” most of these users simply cannot find a legitimate use for social networking.

Personally, I belong to MySpace and FaceBook purely because my friends and family have chosen those sites as their point of contact to keep me (and others) apprised of what is going on in their lives. Since I’ve long used this website (rynosoft.com) for updating everyone on what goes on in my life, I obviously don’t need any other website to do so. Consequently, social networking websites have always been a strictly one-way affair for me. Until Rob introduced me to Twitter last year.

It’s difficult to describe what Twitter does because it lacks a close analog in the “real” world. And so there was a period of time after I signed up that I really didn’t “get” what it was all about. I pestered Rob via instant message asking, “What the hell am I supposed to do with this thing?” Do what it says: answer the question “What are you doing?”

Previous to Twitter, I was prone to changing my AIM status to reflect what I might be doing at work or perhaps to make a private joke to those that had me in their buddy list. Twitter provides a better outlet for that instinct and has been described by many as “micro-blogging”. Although that’s a fair description, I think it may discourage those who are not interested in or are intimidated by the prospect of blogging. Most bloggers have a theme or specific subject matter that they tend to write about, but the only theme for most Twitterers is the triviality of day-to-day life.

Don’t let that description deceive you, though. Life is mostly made up of a series of trivial events which, when taken together, provide a bigger picture. When you have access to occasional blow-by-blow descriptions, you become more involved in someone’s life in a very immediate way. Sometimes I’ll just passively digest these tidbits as they pass by while other times my curiosity will be piqued and I’ll seek more information via email and/or instant message. The end result is that Twitter brings people closer together even though physical distance may separate you.

You may have noticed the addition of a Twitter status on the right side of this blog several months ago. Twitter provides the web code necessary to display your most recent “tweet” (Twitter’s term for a single entry), so it’s very easy to share your Twitter status on web pages and blogs. Twitter also has SMS (i.e. text message) and instant message features which let you tweet even when you don’t have a web browser in front of you. For example, if you’re at a concert you might like to share that your favorite song had just been performed. Since I don’t have a mobile phone, that’s not a feature that I use.

More information on Twitter: