Dear Twitter users,
Please do not link to news stories on sites that require registration. If I click on one more link that redirects me to a registration and payment page, I’m going to explode. I’ve never exploded before, but it sounds like a irreversible and painful thing I’d prefer not to experience.
Sincerely,
http://twitter.com/Rubenerd
With their latest controversial site design change, from where I stand it seems the people at Facebook have forgotten what the service they’re providing really is. Whereas Facebook initially served as a way to keep in touch with friends at work, university and so forth, now it seems they think that functionality is secondary to the need to show users a stream of information bites about what people are doing.
Hold on a minute, read that last line back: a stream of information bites about what people are doing. Does this sound familiar? Yes, it seems the Facebook team are trying to take on Twitter, an entirely different microblogging platform (and the only social network I use constantly).
Current message on the new Facebook home screen.
Why? Is it a case of jealousy? Is it the current cool thing to do?
Twitter and Facebook are entirely different services catering to different needs, or at least they used to be. Twitter’s entire reason for existing is to allow you to constantly post what you’re doing and follow people who’s tweets you find interesting; Facebook was supposed to be like an address book you could comment on. The difference is substantial.
The mistake Facebook has made is assuming all their users care about what every single one of their contacts are constantly doing! I’m very interested to read what Jerry Novak is doing during his day on Twitter, that’s why I followed him in the first place. I’m far less interested in what some of my former contacts on Facebook are constantly doing.
Screenshot of my Twitter profile taken a few minutes ago showing some updates. Why use an imitation when you can use the real thing? 
Mark Zukerburg was quoted as saying to his employees at Facebook that "disruptive companies don’t listen to their customers". I think that says a lot, but not necessarily what he was intending. It is true that sometimes companies need to push the envelope to innovate and create things that people will need in the future, but this assumes you’re capable of it. Perhaps time will tell, and only after people have changed their ways to suit the needs of Facebook rather than the other way round. How many more times do they think they can do this?
I think the people at Facebook need to step back and think hard about what they’re trying to do and what people use their service for. They’re not running a bleeding edge site used by nerds and beta testers anymore, there are huge numbers of people who (for better or worse) are using it as a primary means of keeping in touch now.
In the meantime if you’re angry about the Facebook changes, join us on Twitter won’t you? The water is fine!
Clipmarked from Twitter:
@SilkCharm There are 76 unique Australian Twitter users. The rest are Fake politicians.
If you’ve noticed the two latest posts (New Clipmarks account test post, Clipmarks test post with a photo), I’ve been playing around with the Clipmarks service I found out about from G’day World. From the welcome email:
Welcome to Clipmarks, rubenerd!
Here’s a link to your personal page on Clipmarks.com: http://clipmarks.com/clipper/rubenerd/
On Clipmarks.com you can save clips of text, images or videos you find on the web, and see what other people are clipping.
Clips you save publicly will be included in the feed of Newest Clips by everyone. If other users like a clip you post, they will "pop" it over to the latest pops page for others to see. If you consistently post clips that other users find interesting, they may add you as a Guide to easily keep up with all your clips.
The idea is you install the Clipmarks plugin which places a small paperclip on your Firefox toolbar. When you reach a page with a block of text you want to keep and share, you click the bookmark then click and/or drag your mouse over those areas then click the Click Here When Done Clipping button that appears above the page. A new window then appears which asks you for a title as well as an optional description and categories. When you’re done, these clips appear on your profile page, in my case its here.
Popup that appears when you’ve selected the parts of the page you want to clip and share. You can choose to keep clips private too.
I’ve been looking for something to help me remember individual quotes instead of pasting text into files or just bookmarking an entire page on Delicious for assignments and personal use for quirky, funny and/or interesting individual quotes and media I find. I reckon this might be a great way to do this.
What I’m really interested in though is being able to take quotes from pages and post them on my blog in a similar way to sharing items on Google Reader. So far the only problem I’m running into is the automatically posted quotes here really do not match the colour scheme I’m using here, and all the extra formatting seems a bit excessive, plus they don’t validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict either. I wonder if there’s a way to automagically export raw text and images instead of having all the formatting? Guess it’d be pretty easy to write a script to clean the posts up.
Anyway getting a bit ahead of myself here, I’m still playing around with it for now. I’ll post a longer review once I’ve learned more. Anyone else use Clipmarks and have opinions? I know from Jim Kloss that the links are working for him, we’re off to a good start!
Clipmarked from Flickr:
Clipmarked from Whole Wheat Radio
Northern Lights, the Northeast’s superlative veteran string band, doesn’t qualify as typical traditionalist. But over a three-decade career, the band has created its own tradition – a constant exploration of new musical territory without ever losing its acoustic and vocal bearings. From 1990’s "Take You to the Sky," to 2005’s "New Moon" (Fifty-Fifty Music), the band has fused an eclectic mix of traditional roots music, rock, country, soul and gospel with the high, lonesome vocal sound and instruments of bluegrass.
Well there you go dear readers, it seems despite my obsessive obsession (yes, my obsessive obsession) with celebrating pointless milestones I completely missed one that happened recently here that potentially will not be repeated in a very long time.
Despite WordPress assigning it the ID of 3912, the previous post here on the Rubenerd Blog was post number 1234! If you represented this as a five digit number, it would be 01234 which coincidently is also an ascending string of consecutive numbers. Unfortunately if you tried to do this again by adding -1 to make it -101234 it no longer works; you were probably already smart enough to figure this out. "Probably" and "already" both end in "y".
ASIDE: I can’t believe my post 1234 was about Facebook of all things!
The next time we’ll be able to celebrate a pointless milestone like this will be post 12345, a whopping 11111 posts away from now. I can hear you all breathing a sigh of relief already!
Happy 1234 everybody, don’t party too hard!
Thought I’d just post another quick update on my adventure to get the WordPress WXR/RSS export feature working. In an earlier post I claimed I had given up on this, but since then it’s been gnawing at my mind enough to make me want to figure out what’s going on!
ASIDE: Sometimes I find thinking out loud helps me work through a problem. Please forgive me if I make no sense! Well, less sense than I usually do.
I read in several WordPress forum posts that sometimes faulty authors (ha) in the database are enough to confuse the exporter, so I merged my authors into one. Not only didn’t this fix the problem it actually made it worse; before it would export 4.4MiB of data, now it exports 4.2MiB worth. This translates to exporting all the posts I’ve created here up to early October last year.
I’m not a PHP guy, but I figure if this problem was being caused by an insufficient maximum file size value in my host’s PHP settings, doing something on the database end wouldn’t make any difference. I’ve also seen people throw around numbers like 25MiB and discussing the need to use Gzip on PhpMyAdmin for example; my blog would not reach that.
My next thought was that it might be a poorly formed post that trips the exporter and stops it. If this were true though, I would expect the exported file to abruptly end; instead it’s well formed (well, as best as a WXR/RSS file could be expected to be) and has all the correct end tags in place. It’s a valid file, it’s just missing a large swath of posts! Also, every single post validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict except one which has an embedded video, and that was written much later than when the exporter stops.
I also doubt it has something to do with the server configuration because my Rubenerd Show WordPress installation on the same server was able to export all the posts without any problems at all. I can only logically surmise that there must be something up with my WordPress install on here, or a fatal error in one or more of the MySQL database tables. I’ve only been running this install since early 2006 but who knows, perhaps something corrupted it.
I will figure this out if I have to stay up all night… if only the Boatdeck Cafe was open 24 hours!
Ever wanted to see what a severe snow storm radar chart looks like? CalgaryGuru forwarded me to a site from Twitter showing the current weather in Strathmore, Alberta in Canada. Looks like scary stuff.
My dad really loves Canada but he says the weather is the only thing he doesn’t like. Then again he has been stationed in Singapore since the mid 1990s where the weather is 32C every single day of the year. One assumes what you’re acclimatised to would affect your perceptions of weather. For example it doesn’t get cold enough to snow in Adelaide other than the Adelaide Hills, and yet I find it absolutely freezing by comparison!
We kept conversing on Twitter and he directed me to a photo of Calgary with the mountains in the distance:
From http://www.cnam.ca/images/calgary_skyline.jpg, copied here so I’m not hotlinking.
The closest photo I have is one I took in the other direction, a photo of Adelaide from Mount Lofty. Certainly looks warmer if a bit drier!
But back to CalgaryGuru, we all hope you’re okay and are able to get along those roads safely tomorrow.
For a period of time in 2006 I had del.icio.us automagically create posts here each day containing all the links I had bookmarked with their service; for security and to make it easier for myself I created a separate WordPress author for it to publish under.
ASIDE: Interested in what I was bookmarking back in 2006? All these posts were filed under the del.icio.us category here. Lots of memories and broken links already ^_^.
I long since decided to turn this feature off because I figured if people wanted to see my del.icio.us links they could just subscribe to it’s RSS feed. This means for several years I’ve had a dormant author. I’ve read problems with authors have been responsible for some problems with exporting WordPress WXR/RSS feeds, so I decided to delete it and attribute the posts to myself instead.
The steps to do this seemed simple enough, but I was a bit nervous about the second step! I can confirm though that this works in WordPress 2.7.1.
A part of me was sad to delete something created all the way back in 2006, even if it was something trivial like an author on a blog. I reckon my life peaked around then, everything since has been a steep downward slope. Mid-life crisis at 23?
