tech ronin

Added my Twitter feed here in the side bar

Hi folks. I just added my Twitter feed (the feed will always show my latest 5 posts) to the sidebar near the top of my page. For the most part, these are my 1-liner ideas as they occur to me. Some of ideas the I post on twitter may later appear in a blog post where I have plenty of room to do them justice.

One of the things that stops me from doing some blog posts is that the idea is either too short or too involved. Now I have a place to put my quick insights, opinions and finds.

Lately, I've been surfing the social web. These are the sites that take advantage of exciting social web and web 2.0 concepts like friends, groups, ratings and comments. The top one at the moment is Twitter. I like following the thoughts of smart and interesting people who are interested in some of the same things I am.

If you are going to use Twitter as an information source, all you need to do is find people whose thoughts and discoveries you want to follow. A good way to do that is to use TweetScan or Summize to find people who are engaged with some of the things you are.

If you just bought an iPhone, you'll probably want to search for the word iPhone. That sort of thing.

Oh, you'll want to get yourself a free Twitter account, of course.

The second thing you can do with a Twitter account is to post your own thoughts and discoveries in 140 character blurbs. You can include URLs by typing or pasting them in.

You'll want a Twitter client if you get more serious about it just because then you have a more powerful tool at your disposal. I'm using and enjoying Twhirl on my Mac these days.

As far as what to post, the rule that unless you are only trying to communicate with close friends, don't post about the mundane things you are doing, is a good one. If you are going to watch or finished watching a movie and can add some interesting comment about it that's good. You can really post whatever you want. Maybe just type something in for now.

Later on, if you enjoy writing to an audience, you'll be thinking of them when you write and that will guide what to post. If you use Twitter professionally or want to build up your blog readership, this could start feeling like work. That's OK in those contexts, but otherwise, have fun with what you want to do and if something seems like a good share, share it.

This really wasn't meant to be an introduction to Twitter, but I wanted to explain what the Twitter posts are doing on my blog page and while writing, thought of a few tips for those of you who are interested in what Twitter is all about.

Brad Isaac is doing some great blogging lately

Brad Isaac is blogging up a storm over at Achieve-IT!. I relate to Brad because he is so sincere and straight-forward. And that's not to say he isn't smart. He does excellent but not fancy or showy pieces of importance.

I am the ambitious sort myself, so I really appreciate his ideas about achieving your goals and other salutary bits of life wisdom. This is meat and potatoes. With lots of interesting meat.

His latest post today is called Anticipate Attacks as You Work on Your Goal. If you are working on a goal, you'll love this, his own personal story with an inspirational ending that will add something worthwhile to your day.

Brad has his own goal software product that I would check out if I used a Pocket PC. If this sounds interesting, go over to his page and try out a few of Brad's Best-of Achieve-IT! posts listed at the upper right on his front-page.

If you are afraid you've been surfing too much and don't have time for one more quick read, this post of Brad's might be the perfect thing for you: 7 Ideas to Help Prevent Mindless Surfing.

Technorati Tags: goals, GTD, weblogs

Two *New* Blogs I'm Enjoying

Tonight while browsing the web I found a blog called: The Wandering Novelist's Blog. The sub-title is: How Do You Write a Novel? I Guess I'm about to Find Out. This 22-year-old English chap decided on New Year's Eve to go for it and try to write a novel. Maybe I'm just a sucker for ne'er-do-wells but I find his 8 or so posts to be the beginning of an interesting story.

My second new blog favorite is PigPog | Creativity Anywhere. PigPog is a two-person blog whose authors are Michael and Sam. They are a couple and just this last week, Michael proposed and Sam accepted online. I know, now I'm really looking bad - I'm afraid I really look like a voyeur. Whatever, maybe that's normal human behavior - did you ever hear of People Magazine?

So, back to PigPog. The GTDers in my readership will probably recognize PigPog. Michael has written a lot about GTD including his very own PigPog Method. I enjoy the GTD posts as well as those on various writing and drawing implements. The honesty here is as close to 100% as I've seen. Oh, and Michael just recently quit his job and is trying to make enough money from blogging to avoid going back to a real job.

Technorati Tags: Moleskine, GTD, Writing, Writing a Novel

Recommending a Million Monkeys Typing

I've been reading A Million Monkeys Typing for a couple years now and every so often, I am just downright impressed. In fact, if the subject he writes about interests me the least bit, I can be virtually guaranteed to be greatly informed and entertained by his rich, interesting and well-crafted posts.

Douglas Johnston's so called random musings are often what I wish I would have written. My posts tend to be more often off the cuff thoughts only partially formed and thought through. His posts focus my mind and make me feel - well-informed. Kind of like an in-depth New York Times article but more authentic, casual and personal. And self-effacing. Which is so appreciated. I'm not diminished in the process – only enriched and stimulated in a salutary way.

You gotta bookmark this guy or subscribe if you like some of the subjects I cover here. You'll find less gadgets by far even though he's a technical kind of guy. And more and better of the best of what I've done so far.

One more thing, I can't leave the topic of Mr. Johnston without also pointing you to his cool D*I*Y Planner done with the same level of care. It's a planner system with custom pages. I believe he doesn't charge for his templates either. If you are a designer, you can take his templates and modify them if you like to your aesthetic taste. If you are not a designer, you might still like to customize the templates to meet your own particular needs.

Technorati Tags: DIY Planner, knowledgework, moleskine, Macintosh, GTD

I'm the first FileMaker Addict

Hey. There's a new blog out there called FileMaker Addict: Profiles of People Passionate about FileMaker. It's compliments of Tim Dietrich. I'm honored to be the first one Tim interviewed. It took me exactly 30 seconds to subscribe. Check it out!

Google blog search could extend the reach of blogs

Wow! This google blogsearch is instantaneous. Yay! That totally works for me. It makes my information searching life a lot easier because most of the time I want to search blogs rather than the whole web. The quality of the hits is vastly superior and up to date.

Now I really want to make the google search window in Safari do the Google blogsearch. Let's see... I know there's a way to do that. Some plug-in...

Meanwhile, I'll just put this as b in my bookmarks bar. Backpack will have to take a backseat.

So, how will this help us bloggers and blog-readers? It could work something like iTunes worked for podcasters. When iTunes came in with its podcast directory and podcast section, podcasters saw a tripling or more in their listenership. Now, google blog search isn't as huge as the iTunes thing except it's google so could be a lot more widespread than iTunes.

If google blog search can make it easier to find good bloggers or find good information written by bloggers, it will increase blog readership. Simple.

Of course, this will possibly hurt technorati. Maybe a lot. Technorati will have to adapt. Google is the 100 lb gorilla on the Net. When google tramples all over your turf, you jump.

What if normal people start doing blog searches? Even if they just do 1/10th of their searches as blog searches, that could be a huge win for bloggers.

I'll let you know. OK. I put Tokerud in and was greeted with a list of my posts. I put Janet in and found my first blog post at 15. Ego surfing can be fun. If you are a blogger, you gotta play.

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs, google, search

My New RSS 2.0 Feed Here

Hi folks. I got with the program and started using Feedburner to generate my news feed. Now when you subscribe using my orange FEED button in the left column or just grab this, you'll get the finest of RSS 2.0 feeds. Try it! If you do, you'll also help me track my readership which I will greatly appreciate. Who knows, maybe all that readership information will inspire me to greater blogging heights?

Technorati Tags: Blogging, RSS

I'm a pen freak too

I don't feel bad about being very particular about the pens and notebooks I write with. It gives me pleasure and I am a designer (software design, but still), so it figures I would be picky.

Here's the pen I like best and use at the moment. This Pilot Q7 gel pen sells for $3.48 at my local Staples. I would pay more, but I'm glad I don't have to. I can afford to have plenty around so I've got one wherever I need one.

These guys can use the vaunted Pilot G2 cartridges if you prefer. I like the .5 mm Q7 cartridges better, but that's just me. I haven't heard anyone else talking about my favorite pen so I thought I would mention it.

By the way, I used to be a Dr. Grip freak, but that enthusiasm ran out and now I'm into these. Whatcha gonna do? It's only a pen, but to me it's one of those small frequent pleasures that costs little but adds a lot.

Oh yeah, one more thing on the pen/notebook fetishists. I have to believe that these people need to be writing. Blogging has been the perfect thing for me. If you love pens and notebooks - a lot. That's you sidling up to the possibility of doing a lot more or more serious writing or sketching.

Technorati Tags: blogging, gel, moleskine, notebooks, Palm, pens, Q7, rollerball, writing

Del.icio.us fills the gap in my knowledge sharing toolkit

I'm a late-adopter when it comes to Del.icio.us. Actually, today is the first day I've really used it correctly. It's not all my fault, I've never seen a decent Del.icio.us tutorial that made it accessible to people like me who don't have time or patience to futz around indefinitely or even for a few extra minutes.

Also, probably one reason it took me a while is that I didn't particularly appreciate the plain-jane del.icio.us UI. But, yesterday I found Cocoalicious and, other than the fact that it too has no documentation to speak of, it looked cocoa-good. So I futzed with it long enough to figure out how to post the pages I like and appreciate to del.icio.us - simply and easily. Yay!

Cocoalicious also functions as a webpage viewer for all my Del.icio.us links. And I've selected Cocoalicious as my NetNewsWire weblog. This is working.

This is a breakthrough. Up till now I had two choices when I ran across a cool post: (1) copy it into my own personal knowledge-stash in DEVONthink or (2) blog about it. Since I don't have the time to blog about every cool post I find, I've been opting for the solitary, hoarding route of putting the full content of each article I like into DT, telling myself I might use the info in a blog piece some time in the future.

But now I have a fantastic third option. I can share what I find by posting annotated links to del.icio.us. And I can still collect it in DT if I must -- I love to use multiple colored highlighters in DT as I read stuff.

Del.icio.us provides the ultimate light way of sharing. Cocoalicious, by the way, makes it a snap to do. So, I can now say that, if you like tech ronin, you might well want to subscribe to my delicious feed or just take a look once in a while because I find a lot of cool stuff and am tagging and bagging it to share - starting today.

Technorati Tags: cocoalicious, del.icio.us, DEVONthink, knowledgesharing, sharing, socialsoftware, tagging

The Future of Flickr Daily Zeitgeist

I saw the Flickr Daily Zeitgeist photo display-thingy over at Preoccupations yesterday and really liked it. Very nice way of telling people you are on Flickr and showing them a few of you and your friends' pix. I just clicked the get your own link at the bottom to, well, get my own. So there it is over below my own picture. Definitely cool because I don't know most of these folks coming up on the screen but, if I want to know, I just click the miniature photo to see a bigger version and find out who it is.

Once I clicked the get your own link, I could choose among these options for what would appear on my dz: Everyone's photos, Your photos, Your contacts' photos or You and your contacts' photos. When you click a choice, some code appears in a little box that you can copy and paste into your blog or website. I copied that stuff and pasted it into my TypePad left sidebar html. Published. Done. I supposed you have to have a Pro level TypePad account for this right now. Hopefully, if that's true, you'll have the option to get it into the basic and plus levels soon. I would love it to see TypePad getting more connected to Flickr. Repeat after me. Cooperation is good. Cooperation is good.

Flickr says this is just their initial release of daily zeitgeist and more features will be added. Wouldn't it be great to be able to more finely control what shows up on that little guy? Here's what I would do. First, I'm probably going to put up enough photos on Flickr to have it show only my photos - which would be one cool thing. Pick a photo set and it displays a rotating and random sampling from that. That would be cool for visitors.

But I would like to include pix of my Flickr friends as well. I have my dz set to show my photos plus the photos of my contacts. I would like to be able to deselect certain contacts or even better rate them or something so I can have more of one contacts photos than another maybe.

And I would also like to get photos from a group perhaps. Now I don't want three dz's on my blog, but can I rotate between maybe - my photos, my contact photos and then selected groups' photos?

If you had a little more granularity here, you could do other interesting things that I can only begin to imagine. All sorts of little creative presentations perhaps. Anyway, this things is cool and now all I wish is that I could change the white background to match the green in my sidebar.

After my brief flirtation with Flickr last Winter, I've been away from it. But I wanted some more contacts so that I could see different photos coming up on my 1001. Geek motivation, that. But I'm kind of introverted, so hey, whatever it takes. So I just started surfing my favorite bloggers' pages and seeing if they had a Flickr link. Many did and I went to their Flickr pages and added them as contacts. Easy.

Technorati Tags: Flickr | Daily Zeitgeist | photo streams | photos | photography | 1001 |