I've had a busy time of things lately with my youngest daughter now reaching the grand old age of two, so I thought this would be an interesting time to review a few prior posts.
A Few Personal Lifehacks
Ah, backups... I've changed again! Remember how I started with weekly backups stored locally, and then advanced to daily backups? Well now I've gone a step further, and have finally started backing up some items online with Amazon Web Services. This is because I've had failures with both internal and external drives, and so therefore I opted for a third level of backup. Some photos - especially those of the kids - are too valuable not to be kept elsewhere.
Backups as a whole are an area I tend to think about a lot and consider a great deal. I know I consider my data too valuable not to back it up and keep those backups up to date.
The Problem With Joan Harris
We've now had five series of Mad Men, and I'm still not overly keen on the character as a person. Great series to show the acting talents of Christina Hendricks though. I have a new respect for her as an actress, although I still think no actress matches Elisabeth Moss on the show (Kiernan Shipka might get there one day, but not just yet).
I found season five of Mad Men quite odd. Brilliant at times, frustrating at others. I've seen some reviews which felt the whole series was brilliant, and yet I felt a little bit disappointed by it. And yet I'm still wondering where it ends up going in season six, and who'll feature, how they'll feature and even what year it will begin in. If it is 1968 that augurs well in my book.
vBulletin's Venture Into Blogging
Seems a bit odd to me that this continues to be the most popular post I've written, and by some distance. I haven't written about vBulletin for a while but I think as a whole the vBulletin team have lost their way. What was a simple forum software is now a massively bloated content management system. The overall package, which used to weigh in at a manageable 10Mb, now hovers at the 30Mb mark (which does matter for some of us). Where products like Wordpress will update quickly and simply through a wizard that even downloads the software package for you, the vBulletin upgrade is somewhat more laborious in comparison.
I still don't trust it as a stand-alone blogging platform (duh, I'm blogging here after all) but I can see how it makes sense when used with a forum (as I've tested myself over at Braves-Nation.com). Unfortunately the implementation isn't great, there is no uniformity in regard to tags that might see more linking between posts written by separate users, and once again, there's a mammoth amount of bloat there. Pity, it could be so much better and leaner. Unfortunately the way vBulletin has been going recently I can't say I'm hopeful of improvement, and I've even been considering switching to Xenforo.
My Top Three Twitter Peeves
Can I add one to this? People asking celebrities to retweet their causes, all... the... time. But you know what's great? Whereas another site (that won't be mentioned by name) consistently does things to annoy their users Twitter seems to find ways to make things better. However it wasn't until recently that I discovered that you can turn off retweets by anyone you're following. It's a game-changer, something else which enables you to get Twitter working the way you want it to.
Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts
Saturday, 30 June 2012
Thursday, 31 March 2011
My Top Three Twitter Peeves
Had to mention something this month, and as I'm running short of time this topic will do, especially as it is fresh in my head.
Up until the last few days I have had two big Twitter peeves, but upon further thinking that has become three. In reverse order they are:
3) Duplicated Content
Frequently caused by users who have some kind of automatic feed publishing to their twitter account. While slightly irritating when journalists posting a blog post which is repeated shortly afterwards this is worst of all when some companies use this. I had to unfollow one online store recently which for some reason was tweeting every entry to one of their competitions. It all became a lot of clutter, so unfollowing became the only choice for me.
2) Tweet Chats
A slowly growing, very annoying trend, especially when they take place overnight (UK time). I typically wake up to 80-100 tweets, given that my interests lead to me following people in America. However when one of those users has a tweet chat which single-handedly increases that count by about 50 it reaches overkill. For me this is what chatrooms were invented for, not Twitter. If I want to follow up later I can hopefully get a transcript somewhere.
1) People Retweeting Secondary Accounts
This really winds me up, because frankly it looks desperate. There is nothing like an account mentioning another account (whether it be personal cause/business/etc.) in a casual way, only once they've done it five or six times you follow that link and find they have less than twenty followers. If I haven't followed within one or two mentions I'm not likely to, why continue to try to blundgeon me with this?
Of course they can't stop there, so they still pound away with repeated mentions of the second account, and even get to the point where they retweet their own tweets from the secondary account. What is it they say about people who talk to themselves?
(I know, it's the one way to guarantee you get a sensible answer. Ignore me.)
Up until the last few days I have had two big Twitter peeves, but upon further thinking that has become three. In reverse order they are:
3) Duplicated Content
Frequently caused by users who have some kind of automatic feed publishing to their twitter account. While slightly irritating when journalists posting a blog post which is repeated shortly afterwards this is worst of all when some companies use this. I had to unfollow one online store recently which for some reason was tweeting every entry to one of their competitions. It all became a lot of clutter, so unfollowing became the only choice for me.
2) Tweet Chats
A slowly growing, very annoying trend, especially when they take place overnight (UK time). I typically wake up to 80-100 tweets, given that my interests lead to me following people in America. However when one of those users has a tweet chat which single-handedly increases that count by about 50 it reaches overkill. For me this is what chatrooms were invented for, not Twitter. If I want to follow up later I can hopefully get a transcript somewhere.
1) People Retweeting Secondary Accounts
This really winds me up, because frankly it looks desperate. There is nothing like an account mentioning another account (whether it be personal cause/business/etc.) in a casual way, only once they've done it five or six times you follow that link and find they have less than twenty followers. If I haven't followed within one or two mentions I'm not likely to, why continue to try to blundgeon me with this?
Of course they can't stop there, so they still pound away with repeated mentions of the second account, and even get to the point where they retweet their own tweets from the secondary account. What is it they say about people who talk to themselves?
(I know, it's the one way to guarantee you get a sensible answer. Ignore me.)
Tuesday, 28 July 2009
Getting Follow Friday All Wrong
Thought it might be interesting to take a look at one of my favourite web sites at the moment, and who I'm following on it. Yep, I'm talking about Twitter.
Now some of my love of Twitter has to do with my new phone. I get Twitter updates straight to it, regardless of where I am and and who I'm with. It makes Twitter extremely useful, as the content is purely text (unlike some of the HTML e-mails I get through to my phone). So who am I following? Let's take a look:
@DesignerDepot Now some people do start following you after you make posts, which is what Web Designer Depot did. However when I took a look at their feed there is lots of interesting stuff to see there. Also on the web design front, I need to recommend @sitepointdotcom and @netmag.
@PTIshow My one remaining can't miss TV show, until ESPN America disappears (sob! weep!). Added bonus points for the daily "Today on the PTI Show Twitter feed... what did you tweet about Mike?" feature on the show that is always interesting. Need to mention @aroundthehorn, as there is probably no other Twitter feed which makes me more interested in any programme.
@sportsguy33 Yep, the Bill Simmons feed. Usually entertaining, sometimes self-promoting and occasionally scathing about us Brits (actually some of his posts, along with some Bob Ryan comments on PTI make me wonder if I really would enjoy visiting Boston). Normally pretty funny though, especially as he's got his friend @jacko2323 on board (Joe House, where are you?).
Like interesting writing that's a bit more serious? I'd fully recommend @jdroth.
My favourite drink, @mtn_dew, as does my favourite lounge @jadande (who gets bonus points for not being his pompous former L.A. Times colleague).
Need to recommend some great apps, namely @firefox, @twitterfox, @dropbox and @shareaholic. If you don't use Windows then you're pretty likely to find something interesting from @davecampbell.
And finally, just because he's shares pretty much all my interests, but is funnier, wittier and more interesting than me... @benjiwilson. And as a bonus, he'll probably post anything important that @easports post as well.
Actually, let's make this the last one. Did you get this far, @JasonLMatthews?
Official Twitter Site
Now some of my love of Twitter has to do with my new phone. I get Twitter updates straight to it, regardless of where I am and and who I'm with. It makes Twitter extremely useful, as the content is purely text (unlike some of the HTML e-mails I get through to my phone). So who am I following? Let's take a look:
@DesignerDepot Now some people do start following you after you make posts, which is what Web Designer Depot did. However when I took a look at their feed there is lots of interesting stuff to see there. Also on the web design front, I need to recommend @sitepointdotcom and @netmag.
@PTIshow My one remaining can't miss TV show, until ESPN America disappears (sob! weep!). Added bonus points for the daily "Today on the PTI Show Twitter feed... what did you tweet about Mike?" feature on the show that is always interesting. Need to mention @aroundthehorn, as there is probably no other Twitter feed which makes me more interested in any programme.
@sportsguy33 Yep, the Bill Simmons feed. Usually entertaining, sometimes self-promoting and occasionally scathing about us Brits (actually some of his posts, along with some Bob Ryan comments on PTI make me wonder if I really would enjoy visiting Boston). Normally pretty funny though, especially as he's got his friend @jacko2323 on board (Joe House, where are you?).
Like interesting writing that's a bit more serious? I'd fully recommend @jdroth.
My favourite drink, @mtn_dew, as does my favourite lounge @jadande (who gets bonus points for not being his pompous former L.A. Times colleague).
Need to recommend some great apps, namely @firefox, @twitterfox, @dropbox and @shareaholic. If you don't use Windows then you're pretty likely to find something interesting from @davecampbell.
And finally, just because he's shares pretty much all my interests, but is funnier, wittier and more interesting than me... @benjiwilson. And as a bonus, he'll probably post anything important that @easports post as well.
Actually, let's make this the last one. Did you get this far, @JasonLMatthews?
Official Twitter Site
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