Easter 2010
Hey folks. For those of you that stop by from time to time, thank you. I do have things to say, but life has taken the spotlight recently. I am very focused on my first, and most beloved project, The Speedzine. At the TheSpeedzine.com, I am blogging and reporting on various motorsports topics and headlines. Doing this, and reporting on the races each week, has taken up a lot of the time I would normally have devoted to this blog.
TweetDeck Icon
With all the social networks on the web today, it is very easy to become overwhelmed by them all. I have accounts with most of them, and I am most active with the same top three that most of my readers are: Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace. All these services have a feature called status, to which you constantly update to tell the world what you doing, reading, thinking, seeing, feeling, promoting, wishing for, etc. Since so many of us have so many accounts, various developers have created a barrage of service updater applications to aggregate and push out information. Up until recently, I have been very big on Tweet Deck, but I now find myself using the web more and more instead.
Tweet Deck is one of the largest updaters on the market. With this Adobe Air based application, I can keep track of multiple accounts in Facebook, Twitter and Myspace. I can even stay up to date with my seldom used LinkedIn profile. I can do most everything on Tweet Deck that I can do in each respective service too. However, there are problems. The Adobe Air platform is sluggish. I don’t get the updates in true real time, I don’t view aspects of each post the same way that the source developers had intended, and overall I feel a tad alienated from the experience. I can see how useful a service like Tweet Deck, or HootSuite, or Seesmic can be for someone that is using social networking as a business model, but for me, I find that the only thing I use them for is to update all my profiles at one time.
For that, I am turning to Ping.fm. That’s exactly what it is for. Updating. That is all I care about. For the rest of my social networking experience, I turn to the host service itself.
What do you think? What services do you use? What do you think about the third party applications vs. the service’s main website? Tell me what you think and post bellow.
Clean up your Twitter Lists
Here is a Twitter tool which can be a little slow to use but is quite a good idea. As Twitter has grown, so has the amount of people we follow and it can become time consuming reading everything. Sometimes it’s difficult to decide who to keep and who to ditch to keep your account fresh.
The site explains:
After logging in (with your Twitter account), enter the number of days in the past you want to check. If you enter 30, then anyone who hasn’t updated their Twitter status (tweeted) in the past 30 days will be shown on a list.
Now some relationships may be offline as well as online, so you can white list your friends, so you don’t ditch them each time you use this. This really is quite an interesting tool because you get to see people and when they last updated their status, I actually found it pretty useful – so I would recommend you give it a try just for the novelty factor.
What do you think of this? How could it be made better?
I have three interesting users for this week’s Follow Friday.
Bytemonkey is an Information Technology Professional in Pensacola, Florida that has been feverishly typing code for over twelve years and fixes his friends broken computers. His tweets are the centered around many of the same concerns as other IT professionals such as dealing with a company filled with simi-computer literate workers, and does so with great tact and humor.
He also is the author of a very entertaining blog, “The Bytemonkey Chronicles”, where he writes and comments on a wide array of topics from around the Internet. Bytemonkey using the Blogger platform and as a blogger myself, I find his website and blog to be in very good taste.
This is the official Twitter account of comedian and television host Drew Carey. Yes, I enjoy his tweets, but more importantly I am on board with his cause. Drew is campaigning an effort to raise money for Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong Foundation, which is tied to cancer research. Drew has committed $1.00 USD for every follower up to 1 million followers to the foundation. So please follow Drew and spread the word about this great cause.
I follow this for the cool factor. Twisst will send you a Direct Message when the International Space Station will be in an orbit over your location. They also send tweets that are ISS and science related, but they do not smother you with tweets of when the ISS is passing over other people’s areas. So far, I haven’t been able to actually see the ISS, but when I can, I will know when.
Of course, what would Follow Friday be without a shameless plug. If you don’t already, follow me! I am @danielvining and I tweet about my daily life occurrences, tech news, and I do like to spark up conversations.
@DrewFromTV
I know this is not a new topic, but I feel like everyone needs to be reminded. Drew Carey, popular from his 90s hit sitcom “The Drew Carey Show”, and as the current host of “The Price is Right” is spear heading an initiative to raise money for Lance Armstrong’s L I V E S T R O N G Foundation. The way that Carey is going about doing this is pretty interesting. He has committed to donate 1 dollar for every Twitter follower he has up to 1 million dollars/followers.
As of October 25th, Carey has 114+ thousand followers. That is just a drop in the hat compared to the millions that other users, like new American Idol judge Ellen Degeneres have. We, the geek community at large, can do a lot to help this cause reach it’s goal. Let us be the grass roots Twitter effort to encourage others to pledge to this cause.
Being a part of this cause if free. Drew has committed the dollars for you, so all you have to do is take action, and follow him on Twitter. Follow http://www.twitter.com/drewfromtv and spread the word by adding him to one of your lists (if you have that feature) and mentioning the cause to your friends, co-workers, fellow bloggers, and of course, Follow Friday.
Sure, 1 million dollars is just a small drop in the bucket, but 100,000 dollars barely makes a ripple. We have until the end of the year to get this done, so let’s do it!
New Website Launch!
I am excited to announce the launching of a new sub site to DanielVining.com today. tweets.DanielVining.com is now live and running smoothly thanks to the WordPress platform and a couple of great plugins.
The premiss of the site is simple. I wanted to create a place where I could store all my Twitter posts for archiving. I searched for a tool or site that could do this for me, but didn’t come up with much. Then I thought, “How hard would it be to create my own pseudo-Twitter site? Not a clone, but more of a dump.” The answer came thanks to the WordPress theme P2. P2 is meant to be the WordPress solution to hosting your own Twitter clone site. In order to get my tweets to the new site, I am using a plugin called Twitter Tools. The settings on this plugin allow me to send my tweets to my blog, with each new tweet showing up as a new blog post. Combine that with the look and feel of the theme, and you get your own personal twitter archive. Now, I can simply back up my blog, which in turn backs up my tweets as well.
"tweets.DanielVining.com"
This website is not meant for mass population. I am the only contributor, and a wealth of traffic is not expected nor truly wanted. If, however, you are wanting to learn how you can too back up your tweets, I hope that this site can serve as an example.
The whole point of tweets.DanielVining.com is to back up the tweets from my Twitter stream, which can be found at twitter.com/danielvining. Check me out, follow me, and keep reading!
Follow Friday #2, September 11, 2009 @danielvining
What if you didn’t know who to follow on Twitter
? Would you randomly start following people? Would you follow people you see mentioned by those you already follow? Most likely you would ask your friends for recommendations since you can trust that your friends will suggest people who are worth following. Which is exactly how FollowFriday began. Full Story on MASHABLE >>
I will follow anyone that is interesting, has intellegent things to say, and doesn’t revolve around SPAMing me (there is a difference between promotion and SPAMing). This week’s Follow Friday picks are a mix of new followers, new twitters I am following and old tweople that have peaked my interest this week.
Enjoy and follow me too! @danielvining
Follow Friday #FF @SwtVibr4nt@koalamattress @sarayeong @rosenz@portcitybeer @xavlur @NavalMuseum@brizzly @EverywhereTrip@virgiliocorrado
follow @danielvining
#FollowFriday – @ChrisTheFeral @thinkgeek @CocoDesign @JayMassey @ChrisKenny @thegizwiz @visitpensacola @NavalMuseum @keselowskiweb – Enjoy
What a day. I was awakened by my girlfriend at just after 7am this morning. It was really great to hear her voice after the day she had yesterday. She ended up in the emergency room due to a killer migraine. They gave her medicine and fluids and sent her on her way. At the time, before we knew what was wrong, I was totally freaking out.
I digress. So I woke up this morning around 7am and talked with my girl for a bit before starting my day. I finished filling an application with the convenience store chain Circle K, which was not the easiest user interface to work in. Afterward, I caught up on my massive amount of email, all three or four messages. Then I stopped by my usual online hang outs, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and a few others. I got all my resumes printed and bound; they are now ready to go when I submit them to various firms next week. By this time, I realized that I hadn’t yet eaten, so I scrounged around the kitchen a little and settled on a Chocolate Fudge PopTart. Yummy, until I drank my milk. YAK! Which reminds me to throw out that milk after finishing this post.
It is now around 1pm and I am starting to think that the day is gonna be a waste, so I called my girlfriend to see if I could bring her something. Come to find out that her parents had just left the house for a while and it was just her and the kids. YAY! I jumped in my truck, and headed over to her place. I got to spend some quality time with her just hanging out at the house. Good times.
Around 3pm, I left her house and was dead set on filling an application at the near by Publix so that the day wouldn’t be a total waste (in terms of the job hunt). It took me about 20-25 minutes to finish up at Publix, so I decided to head toward Target and Wal-Mart. By the end of the day, I put in applications at Best Buy, Publix, Target, Wal-Mart, Win-Dixie, Lowe’s, and got applications for Home Depot and Office Depot. It felt great to be making some progress toward getting a job.
Next week I will focus on my resumes, and trying to get hired by a design firm or print shop. Someone gave me the idea of job hunting in Mobile, which is about an hour away from here, Pensacola. I don’t know if I want to go that far yet. There are plenty of places to try and get hired here in Pensacola, so I may wait awhile on that avenue. I guess, in the big scheme of things, anything is possible.
