MMMeeja Blog

Twitter Serendipity

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:49:00 GMT

Just a short, throw-away post today as I have a good amount of work on at the moment, but this was too good not to share!

Marshall Kirkpatrick, RSS guru and blogger for ReadWriteWeb was pimping his latest post on Twitter which was immediately followed by a tweet from Barry Carlyon from Leeds Student Radio.

The results could not have been scripted...

Made me chuckle anyway.

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Social Media Best Practices

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:44:00 GMT

I’m honoured to have been chosen to take part in a round of blog tag discussing best practices for online social media. Thanks to Kim Woodbridge for the tag and to Mitch Joel for kicking off the project.

The posts so far have been focussed on remaining calm and not starting a troll-fest, with Kim recommending that we reflect, Ari Herzog saying pause before hitting the submit button and David Bradley saying we should be nice.

This is all good advice but as this is a technical blog, I will give you a technical response...

Automate!

I certainly don’t mean that you should use scripts to spam your blog into every social media service, but we responsible netizens can extend our presence by employing some clever automation.

There are, literally, thousands of on-line communities, blogs, digg-clones and forums, so we cannot keep an eye on them all without spreading our time too thinly. So I want a notification when I (or my brand) is mentioned, so I can follow up quickly.

You see, I found out that Kim had tagged me for this blog meme when an automated Google search for my name twittered that I’d been mentioned on a web page. I have similar alerts set up for a variety of keywords and can respond quickly thanks to the automated searches.

There are a surprising number of ways that automation can help you manage the firehose of information and social interaction that being an active participant in social media brings. Have you tried any of these?

Import your blog into Facebook
Ping Technorati whenever your blog is updated
Read FriendFeed via RSS
Twitter your Sphins
Make a tumblr account and import your blog’s RSS feed

There are many, many, many more great tweaks and tips to succeeeding with social media, but mine is to automate.

Next...

I pass the baton on to the most beautiful people:

The amazing eMom - she ROCKS a lot
Erhan Erdogan has made FriendFeed his own

Oh, one more - Robert Scoble, c’mon baby tell us your best pratices for social media!

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Automatically Twitter Your Sphinns

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:17:00 GMT

I last posted about twiggit, an automated system to inform the world of your diggs via twitter. In the comments, ecreeds asked whether a similar service for Sphinn existed. I don’t think one does, but here are instructions on using TwitterFeed to do something similar.

It’s Easy

Sign up for twitterfeed, if you don’t already have an account. If you need an OpenID, you can set one up on any Yahoo account - everybody has a Yahoo account don’t they?
Head over to your Sphinn profile page and choose whether to tweet just your Sphinn submissions, or every vote. Choose either the submits or the sphinns tab.
Notice the RSS icon next to the tab bar? That gives you a useful feed of each of your submissions or votes. Right-click and copy the link location.
Head over to your twitterfeed accout and add a new feed like this: You’ll need to change the twitter username and paste in the URL of your Sphinn feed.

That’s all there is to it. When your feed is processed, you should see a tweet from your account like this:

Most social networking sites provide feeds of your interactions so you could use TwitterFeed to do something similar for del.icio.us, stumbleupon, youtube, flickr and more but beware that if you automate too much, people will unsubscribe from you because your signal to noise ratio is too low. FriendFeed is much better place to stream all your web 2.0 feeds.

Hopefully that answers ecreed’s question, if you have any similar queries or want help with anything to do with the web or social media, leave a comment.

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A Review Of Twiggit - Automatically Tweet Your Diggs

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 20:38:00 GMT

Jason from Twiggit dropped me an email a few days ago, asking if I’d like to review his site. He was polite and not spammy so, of course, I said yes.

What Is Twiggit?

Twiggit is a service that will automatically add your Digg submissions and votes to your Twitter stream. It is highly configurable, allowing you to choose to tweet just items you submit, or positive votes too. There are other options to change how often it checks Digg, pause operation or delete your account.

Like many Twitter applications, it requires your Twitter password to work - a limitation of the Twitter API. A lot of the Twitter community really want to see the long-promised adoption of OAuth to replace this, but there’s no sign just yet.

It doesn’t need your Digg password, thankfully, since the Digg data can be read publicly.

In Action

Twiggit produces nicely formatted tweets that use TinyURL to perform URL shortening. You can see an example of one of my twiggit tweets displayed in TwitterFox, below:

When I first signed up for the service, Twiggit picked up one of my Digg votes from the evening before, which was a bit alarming although there have been no other glitches. It seems to a be well-rounded and professional piece of software.

Who Will Benefit?

I think that Digg power-users that organise their networks via Twitter will be best served by this software. As we have seen from the latest MrBabyMan controversy, top users submit and vote on hundreds of stories every day and anything that can lighten their load will pay dividends in time savings.

For the record, I don’t think that MrBabyMan should be banned, and I don’t know if he organises his network via Twitter - or even if he has a network. I do think that Digg’s algorithm is too heavily biased in favour of existing power users but I really do not care about the rest of this spat.

You Could Make This With Yahoo Pipes And TwitterFeed

Yes you could, but why bother? Twiggit works very well and you can get it up and running in seconds. I have made good use of both Yahoo Pipes and Twitterfeed before, but Twiggit just works.

Will you be using Twiggit? Want one for Reddit? Leave a comment.

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From Unboxing To Ubuntu On The Asus EEE 901

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 22:42:00 GMT

Today, I took delivery of my new Asus EEE 901 netbook and I’m quite excited. I bought it to take along to BarCamp Leeds 2008 as my old G4 iBook is feeling a bit out of date for such a geeky gathering.

I want to get Ubuntu 8.04 installed on there with a working Apache server, PHP, Perl and MySql. This post will record my attempts to go from an unopened box to complete set up in just three hours - can it be done? Read on...

Preparation

I’ve read through these excellent articles which cover installing Ubuntu on an EEE and decided that EEE-Ubuntu is the way forward.

Start the clock - 18.15

First to download the Ubuntu ISO onto my desktop machine. I’ll leave that downloading whilst I open the box.

Unboxing

Wow, looks nice. Box contains the netbook itself, power supply and manuals but also a cleaning cloth and carry wallet (nice touch) and curiously recovery CDs, despite that the EEE 901 does not have a CD drive.

I’ll quickly boot it up and check that it all works OK in the standard configuration...

Xandros Linux

Setup is a breeze as a wizard takes you through choosing a username, password, timezone etc. Next, setting up the wifi connection by following the quick start guide. This was not so easy because my network uses a whitelist of MAC addresses, so how to find the EEE 901’s MAC address in Xandros Linux?

Without an obvious command line terminal, I hunted round the icons on offer (a good way of getting to know Xandros). It turns out that I just needed to click the "Properties" button on the network settings dialog and choose the hardware tab.

Once I’d added the netbook’s MAC to the router and entered my shared key to the 901, a DHCP lease was obtained and all was good! Hello Google.

Time check: 19:12

Wifi working? Camera working? Disks OK?

The EEE 901 comes with a diagnostic tool that checks sound recording and playback, display, networking etc so I ran through this before overwriting Xandros. Happily everything worked.

The camera gave an impressive picture and sound output was acceptable. Sound recording was pretty crackly but the microphone was definitely working.

Ubuntu Onto USB

The Ubuntu ISO has downloaded, so now I need to transfer it to my USB stick because I don’t have a USB CDROM (there’s no CD drive built into the EEE).

Using the UNetBootIn application from EEE-Ubuntu is a piece of cake, but it takes a loooooong time. Now to try and boot the EEE from USB and follow these instructions.

Installing Hardy Heron Onto The Asus EEE 901

I choose to use an Ext2 partition on the 4Gb drive as the root partition. The 16Gb drive was split into a 4Gb Ext2 partition for /var and 10Gb for /home. The separate /var is where the MySql databases will reside and Ext2 was chosen because (I read somewhere) that it uses fewer disk write operations. That leaves about 2Gb for swap.

Installing files from USB stick is quite slow and... but wait... FAIL!

A quick google suggested that I might be running out of space, which seemed odd but I shaved a few megabytes off the root partition for a bit of free space and tried again. Same failure. After trying various partition configurations and rewriting my USB stick the time has got to 21:15 - I had failed in my challenge.

The next morning I figured out the problem. The Ubuntu installer was trying to write the boot partition to a non-existent hard disk (/dev/hda) when it should have been writing to /dev/sda. The option to change this is hidden behind the “Advanced” menu on the very last page before installation begins. Change the combo and installation progresses smoothly. So now to check what is and isn’t working...

Some Problems

The first problem I came across was that my USB drive would not mount, giving the error “Invalid mount option”. This was an easy fix, edit /etc/fstab and comment out the last line which attempts to mount /dev/sda3 as a CDROM.

With that fixed, setting up the LAN connection was easy - just follow these instructions. I left the update manager to upgrade installed files and went to the cinema.

Aaargh! I Hate Linux Wifi!

Took me ages to sort the wireless LAN out, I tried re-compiling the kernel, adding about three different native drivers but in the end I had to go with the Windows drivers via NDISwrapper - annoying. Why do I need an Windows XP machine to extract drivers for my Linux netbook? Come on, hardware manufacturers - sort yourselves out.

Installing Apache, PHP, Perl & MySql

I love apt-get, it just makes everything so easy.

Seriously, this part of the installation was better than Windows, better than Apple, better than good! If you’ve ever been through this process before, you know what I mean - no rebooting, no messing.

First Impressions

The little EEE 901 was perfect for Barcamp, connecting to the free wifi at Old Broadcasting House first time. I used it to take notes, surf the net and even hack a few lines of code whilst there. It’s tiny form-factor, solid state disk and light weight made it perfect for the very dynamic environment. There were quite a few other Barcamp attendees with 901s too and we got a few jealous glances from those carrying hefty 19" MacBooks.

The Asus’s strengths could also be its weaknesses - the keyboard and trackpad are difficult to use because of their small size. I need to get a wireless mouse for it as a priority.

In all, the Asus EEE 901 does exactly what I bought it for - it’s an ultra-portable, full featured machine on the cheap. I love it!

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Barcamp Leeds 2008 - Part 2

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

This is the second (and quite delayed) part of my write up of Barcamp Leeds 2008. It follows on from my previous post and covers the later part of Saturday afternoon and Sunday’s presentations.

Saturday Afternoon

I attended a talk on Business Networking for the Web 2.0 world, which unfortunately I found to be largely irrelevant. The round-table discussion descended into talking about talking and though I think that the leader had a strong case (i.e. that there should be a local interest group pitched between the geekiness of Barcamp and the business focus of Open Coffee), a lot more could have been acheived by just setting one up and inviting people.

Cloud Computing

Colin May gave an excellent introduction to cloud computing, with a high-level view of the options available. He argued, correctly, that academia has been using timesharing and grid computing for many years, and cloud computing is simply a repackaging of these concepts for the masses.

Colin covered the benefits and risks of relying on the cloud for essential services and concluded that none of the offerings were ready yet. This was quite controversial amongst the many sysadmins in the audience who made the point that relying on a single provider for any service leaves you at risk of outages.

Consensus was reached over the point that using the cloud is a decision to be made early on in the system design process and that developers and sysadmins must work together throughout the production process.

Colin finished off with a demonstration of Amazon’s EC2 service running an Ubuntu instance. This is something that I’ve been keen to play with for a while and his demo inspired me further.

That concluded my involvement with Saturday’s presentations and I retired to the pub.

Sunday

Sunday was an altogether more relaxed affair with an emphasis on fun. One of the highlights was presentation karaoke, where a speaker picks a random set of PowerPoint slides and makes up a presentation on the fly.

Website Performance

One of the more technical presentations on Sunday saw Tom from the Yahoo Developers Network present their YSlow tool. If you haven’t seen this tool before, I strongly suggest that you check it out.

Chatting with Tom and the other attendees revealed that websites are becoming much more like traditional software development, with debug builds and deployment scripts necessary for complex modern web applications.

TextMate

The last presentation of Sunday was Caius expounding on the joys of the TextMate editor for OS X. It is always useful to see how a power user leverages their tools and Caius certainly knew his way around the editor and its plugins.

Don’t think that I’ll be dumping vi any time soon though.

Thanks

I’d like to say thanks to the organisers and presenters for their hard work and to the other attendees whose willingness to learn and ask questions made the event thoroughly enjoyable. I’ll definitely be back!

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First Impressions Of Barcamp Leeds 2008

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 17:20:00 GMT

It’s the afternoon of the first day of BarCamp Leeds 2008 and I thought I would write up my first impressions of the event. It has been good fun and quite educational so I’m looking forward to the afternoon’s talks.

The venue, Old Broadcasting House in Leeds, is about as perfect as it gets for an event like this - free wifi, copious coffee and plenty of spaces to present, chat or just hang out. The organisers deserve a lot of credit too, things have been running pretty smoothly.

The Talks

I’ve been to four presentations so far:

Introduction to Geocaching
A Geek’s Guide To VC
Design vs Usability
Linkbuilding For SEO

Introduction To Geocaching

This was a nice, easy talk to get into the BarCamp vibe. Presented by Alistair MacDonald, a committed geocacher.

He went through the basics of geocaching, covered a few of the rules and gave an introduction to the culture. As you can imagine with a geeky pastime like this, there are a lot of terms and practices to learn about.

A good talk to open BarCamp with.

A Geek’s Guide To VC

Tim Langley is a serial entrepreneur based in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. He has just started his third company with VC seed funding, so he should know his onions, and his talk didn’t disappoint.

He explained that all venture capitalists are looking for different things. Some are happy to invest in a good idea without a prototype, whilst others want to see some traction before committing money. Rising Stars, a Preston based growth fund were described as “getting it”.

Tim also explained that VCs don’t just bring money to the table, they have business exertise and contacts and can be very helpful to bring heavyweight industry experts onto your team.

For control freaks, there is a downside to securing venture capital - as soon as you sell 1% equity in your company, it is no longer yours to control because there are now legal requirements to act in the shareholders’ interests.

VCs are looking for flexibility and creativity from company founders because they know from experience that businesses change radically from the original visions at startup.

So, when to contact VCs? When you need the money is the best answer. The later that you get involved with VCs, the lower the amount of equity that you have to sell them.

Design vs Usability

Next up, Dean Vipond gave an interesting talk on the perceived clash between design and usability. Dean claimed that too many designers do not care about usability - controversial!

Dean presented the project lifecycle that he uses for design projects at Orange, a highly iterative methodology. The final takeaway was that usability should be a part of the brief for designers, developers and QA.

Link Building For SEO

Just after lunch came Mark Rushworth with a talk on linkbuilding. As the number of attendees was pretty small, Mark transformed the session into a predominantly question and answer session.

I took advantage of this and quizzed him about improvements and suggestions for MMMeeja, particularly focussing on getting links for landing-pages. Mark is a really helpful chap who was quite happy to give away a few secrets and real-world examples that you would never find on Sphinn.

More To Come...

I’ll be blogging about the afternoon’s talks later and attending the second day too. I can heartily recommend the BarCamp experience, so find one near you.

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Barcamp Leeds 2008

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 09:18:00 GMT

I’ve just registered for Barcamp Leeds and if you’re in the area, you should too. I’m told that places are going fast so don’t delay.

This is my first Barcamp so I’m unsure of what to expect, but I think it should be fun! I’m looking forward to some interesting presentations too.

I know Alex from EatingLeeds will be there, so you can ask her where to find the tastiest eats. Leave a comment if you plan to go or if you have any questions about the Leeds area - where to stay, how to get there etc. I’ll do my best to answer them.

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I Think Someone At Google Likes Me

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:45:00 GMT

Wow, chalk up two successes for me with Google!

After complaining about a dialog in Google Reader, they fixed it a few months ago. Another Google annoyance was that I’d been seeing a lot of emails being marked spam in Gmail that I wanted in my inbox.

The problem was that all comments and submissions from the contact form get sent to my email account and, unfortunately, spammers have been trying to abuse these forms. Whilst I was happy for the spam comments to get filtered, a lot of legitimate stuff was being falsely marked as spam too.

GetSatisfaction.com Rocks

I set up a query on Get Satisfaction (a truly superb web application) and received some good advice, but none of it quite worked.

Then, what do you know? GMail added a new filter option, “Never Send It To Spam”. My wish was granted!

Props to Susan Beebe for alerting me to the addition, otherwise it might have passed me by completely.

So...

What should I ask the Google fairy for next? Any suggestions?

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A Better RSS Feed For Sphinn

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 21:23:00 GMT

I’ve been using Feedit for Digg’s RSS feed for a while and love it, but there are other article sites that also make you click through their page before you can get to the meat of the post. Sphinn is one of them, so I whipped up a Yahoo Pipe to improve their feed.

I am a fan of Sphinn, although I am no SEO because it has a lively bunch of informed and technical users. Picking up a few hints on pleasing the Google Gods is useful too. I read the front page articles via my feed reader because I feel that it is quite redundant to vote for stories that are already hot.

I appreciate that this pipe may be controversial amongst the Sphinn community because it will reduce page-views (and maybe revenue) for the site, but I made this pipe to suit my browsing habits and if others find it useful, then so be it. The pipe adds a link to the article on Sphinn so you can easily vote once you have read the story.

The pipe takes the feed of hot stories but you could clone it and change the URL to tweak it for the upcoming ones. Personally, I prefer to use the upcoming page as I find it much easier to mark spam - something that is a big problem for Sphinn and many other Pligg powered sites.

So, here is the feed: .

What do you think, am I being irresponsible and depriving Sphinn of eyeballs? Or maybe you find it useful? Leave a comment and let me know. Oh, and don’t forget to Sphinn this post!

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