Originally posted at Greywulf's Lair

Twitter is the current addiction of tech-heads everywhere, and for good reason. It’s bloody brilliant, that’s why. Rather than try to explain what twitter is (as that’s both complex, and simple, all at the same time) here’s a few of the things that make it so great. Hopefully you’ll get an inkling about the whole twitter thing along the way. If you do, follow me and say hi!

1. One line microblogging
All those half-thought ideas you have? Stick ‘em on twitter. It’s the store for all your random thoughts, notes and stuff that might make a blogpost one day, but not right now. Even if it’s a quote that made you laugh from a movie, or whatever, stick it up on twitter for all to see. Maybe that one-liner will make a great blogpost later, maybe not. Don’t matter. It’s on twitter.

2. Minimal by design
Twitter doesn’t have tags. It doesn’t have massive over-the-top themes. You can’t edit your posts once they’re live. Heck, it doesn’t have anything beyond a small edit box, an rss feed and a rudimentary reply system. Add to that the 140 character limit and you’ve got a system that’s brilliantly, gloriously restrictive. Let me explain.

Other systems add in all the bells and whistles, and they’re frankly poorer for it. Twitter just gets the job done without fuss. More options means more time spend fiddling with your crap rather than just posting and getting on with life. Twitter gets it right.

3. Expandable by design
…but minimal doesn’t mean boxed in. Twitter has spawned countless clients for all systems (of which twihrl is arguably the best) so you don’t even need a web browser open to tweet. Personally, I’ve always got a browser open, but each to their own. You can even post tweets from your cellphone, and get ‘em back too, should you wish. This means twitter is great for keeping in touch with a lot of folks where ‘net access is scarce.

4. It's not about you, it's about them
Don’t make the mistake of thinking twitter is like IRC; it’s not. In twitter, you choose who to follow and they become a part of the buzz in your head. You see when they wake up, drink their first coffee and help out if they ask a question to which you know the answer. It’s like stepping into a crowded room and hearing the conversations buzz around you. Twitter is the life of the Internet, in real time, in which you’re just one more voice in the crowd. And that’s pretty compelling.

5. ChaCha
ChaCha is a human search engine that gives real ansers to real questions from real people. Just send a message to ChaCha and you’ll get an answer, frighteningly quickly. For example, I wrote in my twitter box:

@ChaCha What was the first ever TV sci-fi series?

A few minutes later I received the reply:
@greywulf answer: Do you mean on the sci-fi channel, or ever on TV?

I wrote:
@ChaCha The first sci-fi series ever on TV, anywhere.

And I received back:
The first in the world was produced by the BBC on February 11 1938. The piece was a 35min adaptation of section of play R.U.R.

Now, that’s a very difficult question to answer using Google alone. You’d need to be a query gure just to phrase it correctly and be willing to wade though a load of pages before finding the answer. Also, as far as I know, Google has never, ever asked anyone to clarify what they mean when they’ve entered a query.

What’s more impressive is I received the answer in well under 10 minutes from me asking, while ChaCha was also fielding questions about symphonies, what’s on TV, and flight prices. These people do not sleep and drink far too much caffeine, I’m sure.

In short, ChaCha rocks. And it’s right there, in twitter.

6. Twitter plays nicely, everywhere
At the top of my HomePage I’ve got my latest twitter post. It automatically updates my status message on Facebook. You can put your last handful of tweets into the sidebar on your blog. As it’s an rss feed you can read posts from your twitterfriends in Google Reader or whatever else you use. Twitter plays well, uses open standards and doesn’t try to rock the boat with spurious pointless “additions”.

7. Twitter lets other things play with it, too
Then there’s Twitterfeed. This automatically posts a tweet for you whenever you make a blogpost, meaning all your twitter friends (and anyone else via the public timeline) see you’ve got a new post on your blog. That’s more blog exposure, meaning more page hits. If people like what they see they’ll follow you on twitter, meaning they’ll see your next blogpost, meaning more hits, meaning…..

Cyclic growth. See? Don’t you just love it?

It works in practice too. I get more hits on my blog via twitter than I ever did through services such as Blog Mad and the like.

8. You can turn off the spam
Let’s face it; spammers and marketers are everywhere. They’re the scum of the Earth and deserve nothing less than a slow and painful death. Twitter’s solution is simple - just don’t Follow them. If that doesn’t stop ‘em, Block ‘em. The first option means you don’t see their posts. If they try to send you messages directly (some do, most don’t) then Block them, and they’re dead to you. It’s a simple solution without all that silly over-engineered messing with Captcha we’ve grown to know and hate.

9. Community, community, community
As far as I know (may be wrong here), twitter doesn’t have a forum. It is the forum. How you use twitter depends a lot on who you follow. If most of the folks are photography buffs (say) then you’re going to see mainly photo-related posts, mixed in with all the fun lifestuff that makes twitter special. If you’re into cycling and follow that particular crowd you’ll see chatter about great routes, wheel stizes and the like. In effect, you’re building your own personal forum full of only people you like. If only we could do that in real life, eh?

10. Cool hacks 'n' stuff
The world needs more cool hacks, and twitter has plenty. Twitterhacks lists ‘em all, from folks who got their plants to use twitter when they were thirsty to Twittervision, the awesome real-time (-ish) Twitter/Google Maps mashup.

Follow that link, sit back for a few minutes and watch the whole world talk if you want proof Twitter will take over the world.

You might just realise that it already has.

At the risk of turning Greywulf::Net into a Google-only site, it's hard to ignore the latest news coming from Google Labs.

The Google App Engine lets you.... get this...... design apps then upload and run them on Google's own infrastructure.

For free, if you stick with the 500Mb storage/5 million pageviews per month limit.

While access was limited to the first 10,000 lucky souls for this preview release, the SDK and developer tools are available to download from the site so it's possible to test and develop applications right now on your local systems in preparation for Google's release of more lucky golden tickets.

The SDK itself is a natural evolution of current programming concepts - it's Python 2.5 all the way with hooks into Google's own (straightforward) way of working. Think of it as Python on Rails with support for really, really Big Servers and you're there. More on the actual language and system another time though. Rest assured I like what I see.

What's important about this is that Google have taken another step toward Internet dominance. The App Engine gives developers (whether using Windows, Linux or Mac) access to their infrastructure in ways previously unknown. If you want to create and host your own Twitter-like, Flickr-like or Wordpress-like, Google is likely to be a first port of call for developers regardless of experience. The lure of 100% uptime, massive scalability and freedom to code is going to be too powerful to resist.

One thing is for sure; Yahoo are going to be pulling that offer from Microsoft out of the bottom drawer and taking another long hard look at it.

Yes, the App Engine is that big a news item, folks.

Google Alerts is yet another service from the all-powerful Google stable which proves to be indispensible once you start to appreciate it's power.

The concept is simple; Google Alerts will send you an email containing new search results for keywords you choose. In their own words:

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:
- monitoring a developing news story
- keeping current on a competitor or industry
- getting the latest on a celebrity or event
- keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

Where it shines though is in self-searching. All too often people don't leave a comment on your blog, but pick up on something you've said and post it up onto their own blog or a forum someplace. If there's no linkback mechanism in place you've no easy way of knowing.

That's where Google Alerts comes in. Set it up to send links about you and your site, and you've got an instant window into the buzz around you. You can choose whether to receive an email notification immediately, daily or weekly, and select what media types to target (blogs, news, video, etc).

For my needs, I set it to send a comprehensive email covering all media types on a daily basis provided new hits were found. This drops a snapshot update of the buzz around the Greywulf empire into my gmail inbox ready for me to follow up the new day.

In short, Google Alerts is a terrific fire-and-forget service. Set it up once, and it's done until you change the name of your blog or create a new one.

As with any Google search, remember to put speech marks around names and phrases - a Google Alert for John Smith will return results where John and Smith are on the same page, whereas "John Smith" means they must be together. You probably want the latter!

Till next time!

Found by Alex via several sources, but well worth repeating here!

This is probably the original source. Kudos to Alex for the detective work.

Twitter falls into the same category as the paperclip, wheel and ballpoint pen; it's genius is that it's such a darned simple concept.

In essence, Twitter is nothing more than Just Another Blog Engine, albeit one with a few odd restrictions. The blogposts are restricted to 140 characters or less; you can't edit them; there's no search facility as standard, and no apparent means of commenting (but see below).

It's only when you dive into Twitter with both feet that you start to realise that it's simplicity is it's genius. The posts are spur-of-the-moment things that wouldn't normally merit a full blogpost meaning the public timeline is full of the fascinating ephemera of life - everything from what's on TV to folks blogging about what they're having to eat to latest breaking news.

If it stopped there, Twitter would be great in a soap opera with a cast of thousands way, but there's more.

By default, your own posts are intermingled with those of the folks you're following. This gives an instant snapshot into the zeitgeist of the folks you're watching. For example, during the last Steve Jobs keynote I was almost swamped with the number of opinions about the new Mac Book Air - all before if hit even the tech news sites. Many folks also post links to things which interest them, or to their recent blogposts, meaning it's a great way to both discover new content and promote your own site; unlike many "blog share" sites (mentioning no names), it actually works too - I get a significant amount of traffic daily as a direct result of using Twitterfeed to automatically post updates to my twitter feed.

It's possible to pull rss feeds into your twitter feed too, meaning your twitter home page could be your blog, rss reader and your social network, all rolled into one. Not bad, for such a simple little site, eh? Twitter has an open API too, and it has spawned a small industry offering tools which integrate Twitter with Facebook, the Ubuntu Deskbar, onto your Windows desktop and pretty much anywhere else. It's viral by popularity.

The has developed it's own shorthand syntax for such things as replies (@greywulf replies to me, for example), sending private messages (d greywulf sends a private msg), tags (#ubuntu), and more - all with the bare minimum of coding to support it.

And that's even before we look at it's support for SMS, IM, RSS and much, much more. Simple it may be, but it's also incredibly powerful.

You can always tell the success of a project by how much it is duplicated. Many Twitter clones have risen out of the woodwork over recent months with Pownce promising much, but missing the point about Twitter's simplicity.

One of the coolest diversions comes in the form of Prologue. That's a brand new Wordpress theme which essentially turns your blog into a Twitter clone, but with all the Wordpress functionality you know and love under the hood. While it might take some getting used to, a Wordpress-powered micro-blog might be a viable direction if you want to make regular mini-posts rather than fully blown blog diatribes. The trade-off with going this route is that the social interconnectedness of Twitter is lost, but you gain a real comment mechanism, Wordpress tagging and access to all of Wordpress' widgets, plugins and gizmos. This is the ideal route for a shared blog where multiple users can post and collaborate with none of Twitter's distractions.

By means of experiment, I've temporarily converted my own Wordpress blog over to the Prologue theme, using Alex King's Twitter Tools plugin to also post to my twitter feed. In theory, this will give the best of both worlds.

I'll let you know how I get on.

First of all, I think it's great that the whole web is getting easier to use for everyone. I don't mind that at all. Web 2.0 has changed the way we use our blogs and there are entire communities like Netvibes which are built around widgets and nothing else.

A short while ago we looked at what a Landing Page is, and why you want one. While it's decidedly Old School, landing pages have made a great comeback as a way to centralize all of your contact, social and blogging information in one place. A static site is retro cool to start with, but it's also a great way to maintain a web presence when the databases go down. Again.

This time, we're going to take a look at one way to build a static site of your very own using good design principles that's both functional and easy to maintain.

Read on......

Photoeffects.biz is a web site where you can buy Photoshop actions, get Photoshop training, Photoshop tutorials and much more. A lot of professional photographers are using Photoshop for retouching and correcting, and since it is an application that has a lot of potential if you know how to use it, it is a good thing to learn as much as possible.

Personally it's not often I use actions since I think it's easier to give each and every photo it's own time and effort. They are all individual and need to be treated that way.

It's a hard life being a blogger. It's all too easy to be sucked into the vast cavern that is the Internet and before you know it you're managing multiple blogs, a flickr account, your facebook profile and more. It's easy to lose track of exactly what you have online; what hope do your poor readers have?

One solution is to present a Landing Page on the top-level of your site with your blog located either in a subdirectory or different location entirely. This is also a great solution if you only have webspace for a static site and rely on third parties such as Blogger, Wordpress or ::DEV for your blogging needs.

Put simply, a Landing Page is a static page which gives a brief overview of who you are with links and brief summaries for all of your subsidiary sites. In other words, it's a high-level overview of your presence online. Add in contact information, and you're done.

There are several reasons why it's worth considering using a Landing Page, so let's take each one in turn.

For your own sanity

This is perhaps the most important reason. If you're overwhelmed by the number of blogs you're trying to maintain, the very act of constructing a Landing Page may well help force some order into the chaos. As you add each subsite into the list write a brief summary or mission statement for it; if you see duplications or a site that will easily merge, ditch one and move on.

You may well end up with multiple sites which cover different interests and that's fine. If you realize that you're trying to keep up with three different blogs about crocheting though, it's time to cut back.

Improve your blog security

We're encouraged to give out our precious URLs all the time online, and no matter how "reputable" the requester, there's always a chance that information is going to fall into the hands of spammers or worse, meaning more spam comments, or worse.

One solution is to give out the URL of your Landing Page where possible. As it's a static site with no place for comments or easily modifiable content, it makes your "real" blogs just that little bit safer. Of course, it won't fool the more determined web crawlers and robots, but it's one more small step toward web security.

No reliance on anything beyond the web server

We've all seen our sites go down for reasons beyond our control. Sometimes it's due to scheduled maintenance, but as often as not it's because comes script kiddie has run a behemoth of a query on the database, taking a whole host of Wordpress sites down in his wake, or the admin bungled the PHP upgrade. Whatever the reason, it's your blog(s) which pay the price.

A Landing Page has none of those problems. As it's a single static page, so long as the web server keeps running you have a presence online even when your blog is down. This means your contact information, bio and a summary of your sites and passions are still there, while all others are losing theirs.

As an aid to readers

Remember that 99.9% of the Internet doesn't know who your are. While your friends may well know more than one of your site URLs, it's unlikely that your occasional visitor will know about your other sites unless you tell them, and keep telling them. A single post announcing that you've set up a new site isn't enough; that'll be gone from their memories in 15 minutes, and off your blog's front page in a week.

A Landing Page helps solve the problem by having a persistent showcase for all your sites. Put a link to that in the sidebar of each of them, and you're one step closer to bringing the readership of one site across to the others too. It'll also help attract new readers too, which leads us on to......

As an aid to search engines

Search engines like static Landing Pages. They're easy to crawl, full of useful summaries containing crunchable and easily categorizable words, and don't change very often to boot. Landing Pages are also likely to contain keywords that aren't frequently found together, increasing the likelihood that it's going to appear in that all important Number One google search result spot.

For example, let's say you have two key interests such as Linux and cycling. As they're pretty disparate you maintain two blogs, one for each subject. That's all well and good, but your Linux site is going to be drowned out by all the other ones online, as is your cycling blog. A Landing Page which summarizes both is just waiting to get a hit result when someone enters "Linux cyclists" into the search bar.

As an aside, all Landing Pages should be signed up to a service such as Google Analytics to check their success. If you start to see positive search engines results, adjust your summary text accordingly. Bring 'em on!

Present a professional face to the world

Finally, a Landing Page presents a good image to the world. You're saying in no uncertain terms who your are, and what you do. In a way, it's akin to a resume only without the boring dates and qualification details - though you could always include those too, in a secondary page.

In short, a good Landing Page should be like the Introduction to a book which sets the tone for the following chapters. It introduces the main character (you!) and lets the reader know what to expect as they turn the page.

You'll find my own Landing Page right here. Next time, we'll take a look at one way to create your own.

See you then!

txt2tags is a small (485k download) command-line application for Linux and similar Operating Systems. It takes any text file with a bare minimum of markup and converts it into a beautifully formatted document in any of several formats, including html, pdf, TeX and Pagemaker - all from the same source. This is perfect if you want to provide a document in several formats with the minimum of effort, or want to create pdfs without needing a resource-heavy word processor.

Follow along how to use txt2tags to make a blog of your own, over at txt2blog, the proof of concept site!