Hot Dorkage

@sil tweeted this; blog post kind of an extended retweet:

This one from XKCD resonates with me. I’ll get some original content up here soon I promise. But meanwhile, this one is good. And if you’re old enough to actually have seen *REAL* burma shave signs leave me a comment about where and when you last spotted one.

By the way, I’ve been playing with some twitter tools lately. I haven’t figured out tweet deck yet. It runs really really slow. but I really like tweet track and Qwitter. Rather than bore myself reiterating it all, I’ll just embed my twitterstream for ya: I’ll even jazz it up with some fancy widgety presentation.
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Anyone who tweets or sends URL’s in emails likes short URL’s for different reasons. Twitter users like ‘em because of the 140 char limit for tweets.  You don’t want to use all 140 chars allocation on some hairy ugly URL–you also need a few to hint what it IS! Programmatic  email senders like ‘em because they fit on one line.  Is there an API to do this under program control?

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Feedburner will create an animated banner that cycles through the five most recent items on any RSS feed. I used it to create an IAB standard 468×60 banner promoting my tweets. There are excrutiatingly detailed instructions with screendumps over on my companion hub at hubpages (let them host the frakkin’ screendumps) but in a nutshell:

• Get your feed from wherever
• Burn it at feedburner
• Choose the publicise tag
• Choose Headline Animator option
• Configure your banner, if you use a custom background it must be a GIF hosted on the web somewhere (your blog would be fine)
• Activate, save and grab the code.

Here is my promotional banner for my twitter microblog:

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

I use bloglines to monitor blogs. I like a lot of blogs and even just browsing my subscriptions I can’t keep up with all of ‘em.  Enter AideRSS. It makes some decisions for you about how “good” the blog posts are and filters out the ones that it doesn’t think ard up to snuff.

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For today’s hack let me say for the record that I am into automation.  I hate doing boring things over and over.  Once I’ve done something once, it should be a macro and I should just be able to invoke the macro.  Like brushing my teeth….. um…. never mind, let’s not go there.    With all the Twitter clients out there someone should have written one to inform Twitter whenever you update a blog post.  Why should I have to manually tweet whenever I update my blog? In an earlier post I stated why I’m not that big a fan of Twitter as a social medium to begin with.

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What is the deal with Twitter? I just don’t get it! I’m with Kathy Sierra on this one. (For those who don’t know, Kathy Sierra is one of my all-time heroes — a brilliant educator, writer and blogger who shut down last year due to misogynistic death threats. Would the bullying have been so egregious, or would it even have happened at all if Kathy had been a male? We’ll never know, but you should really check out her link. Kathy makes her points eloquently and there’s no point in me paraphrasing it. Let her speak for herself beyond the cyber “grave” of self-banishment.)

I wouldn’t have given Twitter the time of day except that Continue Reading…