Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

As great a mobile device I think the iPhone is, there was one thing I couldn’t do with it that I wanted without fuss - easily upload a photo from the phone and post the picture to Twitter via my Flickr account. Prior to the 2.0 OS, you couldn’t even copy and paste a URL, but even after you could, it just wasn’t as quick and convenient as most tasks are on an iPhone. Sure, you can use one of the 3rd party services like yFrog or TwitPic, which might be fine for a throw away snapshot you don’t really care about, but if it’s something you’d like to reference in the future, or have control over how and where it’s used, they simply don’t seem like a good option. I merely wanted to snap a photo, enter a title, tap a button or two, and the photo upload to a Flickr set and automatically post to Twitter. Enter Flickit.

It wasn’t evident when I first starting using the app how to accomplish this. Even after I explored the app and found in the default metadata settings an option to post to Twitter or your blog, I didn’t see how to actually enter my Twitter credentials within the app. I then thought perhaps it was a Flickr setting, and looked into the settings for Flickr for the ability to connect to Twitter. Again, I didn’t see any obvious option.

Finally, I emailed the developer to inquire how exactly to accomplish this. Maybe it was just me, but the solution certainly didn’t seem intuitive, which isn’t usually the norm with Flickr. You have to go to your account->extending flickr->your blogs->edit. From the dropdown, you can then select Twitter as the type of weblog you have. Then within Flickit, in the aforementioned settings->default metadata, you can choose to autopost to Twitter, in addition to setting defaults for title, tags, description, sets and groups. You do have the choice within Flickit to not post to Twitter on individual uploads by altering the setting for that image, so you are not locked into tweeting every upload.

Now, you can easily snap a photo, even from within the app, quickly upload it to Flickr, and it will post the title and URL of the photo’s Flickr page to Twitter. Still not the same as a Twitter client harnessing the Flickr API and allowing you to write a full tweet, upload the image, and embed the URL like they do with the other 3rd party apps, but it sure beats using 3 apps and cutting and pasting a link, or compromising in choice of image hosting. Oh, and did I mention Flickit is free?

I’ll start by saying I don’t know much about the subject, but am posting this in the hopes that someone who does can elucidate the issue. My basic dilemma is that I have a short bit of code on my single page templates that checks to see if a visitor is from Twitter, and if so, show a little message. (Not an original idea, I think I saw it on a post at Smashing Magazine). The code they used didn’t work, but with the help of BigJibby in the Habari IRC channel, I was able to get it working with Habari.

I more or less forgot about it, until a few people noticed it and asked if it was a plugin. When I replied it wasn’t, they asked if I could make it into one. So it went into a to-do list I keep of Habari related ideas. This evening I began working on it, and while troubleshooting how to actually output something to the entry single template (that’s a whole other can of worms), I discovered the code snippet wasn’t working. With the help of Michael, we discovered the problem wasn’t with the code snippet, rather it was with the URL shorteners. Twitter recently started defaulting to Bit.ly, and I recently began experimenting with Tr.im, both of which weren’t sending twitter.com as the referrer. Rather, due to their 301 redirect they return NULL. Which in a nut shell sucks.

Somehow Google Analytics is able to track referrals from Twitter, as last week when I had a huge upsurge in traffic from the popularity of the Infinite Summer Bookmarks, I’m seeing 50 visitors from Twitter the first day (of the 785, by far a record for this little weblog).

At this point, finishing the plugin seems moot, as the only way to be sure that visitors will actually see the message would be to use a URL shortener that doesn’t return NULL, of which, the only one we found that to not be the case was Owen’s Pastoid. I didn’t test Tinyurl, nor was I interested in looking for others. The disappointment had already set in. Besides that, if you are auto posting to Twitter with a plugin, you wouldn’t have the option to use a different shortener.

So kind readers/stumble-uponers, if anyone has a solution to this problem, please enlighten me. Meanwhile, I’ll work out the issue with Habari and my desire to output content on a single entry template within the content output, not above the body tag.

For anyone interested in the snippet of code I am using:

if ( parse_url($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], PHP_URL_HOST) == 'twitter.com' ) { echo "<h2 class='twittervisit'>Welcome, Twitter visitor! If this post is useful, don't hesitate to retweet!</h2>";

Just a quick tip to reduce some of the noise in your Twitter stream by only showing @ replies of people you follow. I was a little surprised more people didn’t know this was a feature built into Twitter. However after speaking to a couple of people at the Tampa TweetUp who use Twitter professionally and weren’t aware of the setting, I thought it might be worth detailing.

The basic premise is that you only show @replies from people you are following to people you following. This isn’t a per user setting unfortunately, however, it does reduce the noise, especially for those prolific Twitters with a lot of followers they are constantly responding to. 99 times out of 100, the response is of a personal nature or has no context, so its just a distraction and noise.

This setting removes those, and only shows @replies to people whom you both follow.

To change the default setting:

• from the home page, click settings
• From settings, click notices
• for @ replies dropdown, chose Show me @ replies to the people I’m following
• Save your new setting

Note you can turn off all @replies in this setting as well if you have no interest in messages between two users at all, however, I’ve found that this setting is the best of both worlds, in that at least there’s some context to what a response is about and generally makes sense. No more @so-and-so, LOL!!!

I’ve recently blogged about reducing noise in my online life, and certainly this has helped immensely. There are several people who I follow that have a broad network and use Twitter as a much more social application, but also occasionally link to interesting tidbits that I’ve found useful. If it were not for this feature, I’d long ago stopped following them. Now for there to be a temporary way to mute someone, for instance when they are live Twittering an event you have no interest in…

I’m very excited to be attending the Tampa TweetUp this Saturday night (1/17/09) at the Tampa Museum of Science and Industry. Billed as an unstructured evening for

…other local Tweeple who enjoy Twitter, blogging, and all that is social media for an evening of drinks and great conversation. Enjoy a night out of the office or home, Away from your computer, to dork out with others who share similar passions of social networking and have a few drinks.

Not only is this a chance to socialize in person, MOSI is opening up the top of the IMAX dome, giving us an “exclusive 8-story high, 360 degree view of Tampa” (hopefully I’ll be able to get a few good pics), the museum will be introducing their Virtual Ambassador Program. From what I gather of the details of the event, MOSI is developing a viral marketing program by giving bloggers and social media persons some swag, including:

• One year free membership to the museum
• Free ticket to every IMAX film opening from January - June 2009 (excluding special engagements)
• Free ticket to Body Worlds 3 and the Story of the Heart opening January 22, 2009 - The Original Exhibit of Real Human Bodies.

in exchange for a “6 month commitment in helping raise community awareness online about the museum, Body Worlds exhibit, IMAX, and other MOSI offerings”. I have every intention in participating in the program, as I’d certainly enjoy attending events and exhibits and then blogging/Twittering about them afterward.

In regards to the TweetUp itself, ever since attending BarCamp Orlando, I’ve wanted to connect with local bloggers and web geeks like myself. To that end, I’ve failed, as scheduling conflicts prevented me from attending BarCamp Tampa, as well as a few local blogger meetups. However, I swore to myself that this year I would make a concerted effort to be available for these events, as well as actively help foster more of them. I read with envy tweets from people in places like Philadelphia and Orlando who are connecting in real life with other bloggers and developers. I don’t want to wait until I’m in a different city to meet and connect with folks who live down the road.

Though I don’t consider myself a big “social networker”, I do love me some Twitter, and certainly understand their place in today’s web. I am actually taking my first steps in embracing a broader view of social networking by integrating some of the features available in Facebook Connect into a site I’m developing for a client. I’ve got a long way to go, but it’s certainly been an enlightening process, and has undeniably changed my attitude towards sites like Facebook in that just because I personally do not participate in a particular network, it doesn’t mean the network has no value. That said, I don’t think I will ever say the same thing about MySpace.

I’ve started a draft of a post on getting older, New Year’s resolutions, and where I want to be in ‘09, but an aside to that is I’ve come to the realization that I need to limit the “noise” of my online world, which is the predominate one I live in. Specifically, the last couple of days that means cleaning out syndication feeds, and not just pruning dead ones. It means seriously evaluating everything that comes through my reader and determining if it’s a source of information or entertainment that is of value to me; determining if the volume of content justifies a constant bombardment from the source. Because several items in my reader are of time sensitive nature, I generally have my reader always open, fetching content every 15 minutes. Only when I’m in a serious crunch mode do I shut the reader down. I’m sure I could create filters of some nature that only fetched the time sensitive ones at a more regular interval, and the less time sensitive set to a manual updating, however I’ve come to enjoy the steady flow of information throughout the day. It’s just that I need to hone that stream.

One thing that’s also become abundantly clear over the last few weeks is that several of the sources in my feed reader are being duplicated due to my use of Twitter (either automated heralds of new blog posts, or manual linking). Seeing that Twitter contains entertaining and informative tidbits that don’t make it onto most blogs, the obvious choice was to dump the source in my reader, and continue to follow via Twitter.

Ironically enough, the genesis of this revelation was the result of having signal vs. noise, and the 37 signals product blog in my reader, and following @jasonfried on Twitter. There is so much redundancy and overlapping between the 3, that more often than not, all 3 would hit my “inbox” within minutes of each other with the same content. I certainly understand why, as most people aren’t following all 3, so Jason and 37 signals are trying to market and share information to the widest audience. Unfortunately for those like me, it becomes a nuisances, albeit an enlightening one that spurred a much needed tuning of the throughput.

Now that I’m in this mode, it also means that I’m shrewdly evaluating all blog feeds. A perfect example was tonight, Dave Winer’s Scripting News. 5 photos, in separate posts, with no context. Rather I should say, no context to me. Though I generally find his posts about blogging and “social media” thought provoking, whether I agree with his point or not, the majority of his content isn’t germane to my goals and focus. So out it went. That’s not to say when I have some downtime, and want to read a movie review from an amateur film buff ( and I use amateur only in the sense that reviewing films doesn’t put food on his table, as far as I know), that I won’t wander over to the actual site and peruse his site.

Certainly this process is also being applied to whom I follow on Twitter, as evident by this declaration:

when someone incessantly twitters about twitter, I call the line and unfollow.

This also applies to a few of the more recent people I’ve followed who find it necessary to welcome each of their new followers with a new tweet. Is there any harm in using all 140 characters and possibly welcoming more than one at a time? And is it really necessary to welcome them? Why not just provide good and interesting content in your tweets instead? Even better, if they reply to something you talk about, bloody respond to them. That’s the purpose. It’s not all about you…anyway, I digress.

Finally, I feel as though I should clarify that I’ve resurrected this weblog as a means to commit thoughts down to “paper”, and affirm to myself why I’ve chosen this path, the one of an online world. If for some reason it provokes someone else, all the better. If it provokes a discussion, then I’ve succeeded. If at worst, I can look back and provoke myself to get back on track, it’s not all that bad a thing.