creeva

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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Google reader, I love you - I also hate you.    You are like a bad relationship that I can’t break.   You save me so much time on the web since I no longer have to jump from site to site.   You however do not give me any good reason to use you and save items.    You are a cruel mistress who mistreats me and wastes my time.   Here are things you need to work on.

The first and only thing you need to work is how saved “starred” items work within your interface.     I have been trying to clear out “starred” items since the list was getting unwieldy for me.  Let’s start off by how I use starred items.   I use it to save personally interesting stories that are not relevant enough for me to share the story.   They are also too mundane in most occasions to e-mail to myself.    Yes I know this is in essence using you as a bookmarking service - a service mind you that Google has not officially ventured into.  You are designed to display information rapidly from multiple sources and your saved items is really an after thought.    Or it it?

You attempted to rectify some of this with tagging, the first problem I have with tagging - is other then by using search I can not find a way to find the “folders” made by creating a tag.   It’s all fine and great that we can create tags, but if you can not quickly get to them, what is the point other then to give me hope.   Maybe I’m just retarded when it comes to tags, but tags do not answer the second problem I have, only the bookmarking aspect (and answers it extremely poorly).

The second thing I use you for is saving stories that I can come back and read later.   I get in on Monday morning and I have 367 unread items that have shown up since Sunday when I cleared them out.   I don’t have time to leisurely read the stories, instead I go through and star the ones I want to come back and read later.   By Friday I have over one thousand story I want to come back and read, but who has the time or effort.  The other day to get back to my oldest starred items it took me over 5 minutes of scrolling all the way down and waiting for you to load.   There has to be another way.

A few methods I came up to help the starred overload issue:

Saved feed items by date - if you could categorize items in folder by month/week/or even day that you starred them that would be fantastic and save on a hell of a lot of scrolling.

Starred item by feed it came from - by being able to filter our starred items by source feed would also be awesome.   This would allow me to quickly dig into the stories I want to read when I sit down.   Sometimes I don’t feel like going back to starred items from feeds 6, 5, 89, 90, etc. - when all I want to do is read stories from feed78.     There should be a simpler way to do this then forcing me to tag or search.  I can set up labels and see them on the left in Gmail, why is the reader data so different?

Well next week I plan to publish articles of some of the saved links I have saved by subject.   I’ve been working hard, but like they say you go two steps forward and you end three steps back.     We’ll see how it goes.

Love,

Creeva

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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I’m the crossposting whore - I write once and I have everything designed to publish everywhere (well at least when things aren’t broken like Ping.fm to Myspace blogs).   This however is not syncing, it’s distribution and publishing.     A true sync across all platforms would be amazing.

The example I would love is I make an edit to a blog post, then every place and profile that I’ve published that post on would update with no manual intervention.   Since I can’t do that, Creeva.com is considered my authorative location for all blog posts.  If I wanted to edit those other sites I would have to do each one manually.  Granted I’m sure without using syncing it saves on bandwidth.

Things that I can sync?   Well my contacts and calendars with Plaxo, but that kind of is just the tip of the iceberg.   My biggest issue write now is syncing Flickr photos to Facebook.  I am aware of Flickurbook, but this still uses your local machine - there is no reason this can’t be done “in the cloud”.    It’s all soooo sloooooow.   Seriously at the speed it moves I could just reupload all the pictures to Facebook faster then this thing goes.  It’s free, it’s the developers fault, it’s great what he did; but it’s not the solution I’m looking for.

Finally using my distribution chain I chase all over the web to answer comments.  I don’t mind doing that.   However, wouldn’t it be better if across all platforms and services these comments were kept in sync?   Then I could use the spam filters I wanted to from a central location.  I could reply to comments from a central location.

I’m just pipedreaming again…..

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

I really didn’t have time to write about this last week when it first came to my attention but it seems that Creeva.com has been banned from Technorati for gaming the system.   It states that I republish materials from other sites onto this blog.   This is not untrue, though 90% of my posts actually originate from there.   If I write something I centralize it all on creeva.com.   It’s simple.  It’s efficient.  It allows me centralize and backup my writing.

That being said, they aren’t wrong.   One of the underlying experiments that this blog does is crossposting.  It crossposts to myspace, facebook, tumblr, blogger, and many more.   I don’t make huge piles of cash (haven’t made a dime in my pocket yet).  I don’t blast people with ads, though on some sites including the main there are some that are there.   I’m not doing it to drive up profit in any way.  I’m doing it so different communities can read my stuff.  I won’t harp on it, I’ve written about my crossposting before.

The question is how relevant is Technorati becoming.   I know this question has been asked before, and I used to believe in Technorati.   I didn’t start 500 blogspot accounts to promote the material.  I used 1 public site per service.  For the point of experimentation and proof of concept.  I also have been slowly working on a whole article series on how to crosspost.   With the myriad of services and the fact that data is not yet truly portable, but beginning to become so.   How can these services accurately  track where information is originating from.

Like I said I’m not annoyed, I can live without technorati.  When people are posting links to their site on tumblr, friendfeed, twitter, and others how long before there are more people like me?   Services like Ping.fm and HelloTxt serve in a market segment only to fuel this further.   I’m not someone who has a targetted truly branded blog beyond self branding.   I don’t have a certain topic set I cover and regulary write about.  I’m a schizophrenic writer that is all over the place.   The only thing I hope is consistent is my voice.  Beyond that take away from my writing what you will.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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A couple weeks ago I was talking with a friend about an idea for a new web service.   The web service would have you enter in all the services and sites you use and have an account with online, and then send you a twitter alert when the policy changed and it would show you which text changed.  My problem is while I could come up with the design, function, and architecture I couldn’t figure out any way to monetize such a service.  I let it languish and said I would eventually write a blog article on how to roll you own.   This is that article.

The key feature to making this work (obviously) is a service that can monitor website for changes and give you some sort of data trigger outbound that is usable for repurposing.  I know I could use services that would do an RSS feed, but I wanted something more immediate and trustworthy then RSS for this scenario.  I hunted around and I found the service Change Detection that will send send you an email when a web page has changed.

E-Mail Alerts

With e-mail you have a bit more control.   It’s all easy.  If all you want is an e-mail alert put in the policy page into the page address field.   Then place your e-mail address in the “send alert to:” field.   Easy as cake and your done.

Twitter Alerts

What about getting twitter alerts?  The first thing I’ll point out, I’m not a programmer.  I’m sure there are much better ways to do this in much simpler methods.  I have two requirements for myself.   Keep it free, and it keep it in the cloud.   Make the internet do the work for you, it’s always on and online - your computer doesn’t have to be.  So instead of using an Uber-Twitterbot I’m going to utilize a few free service:

1. Change Detection -Configure the privacy page you want to monitor the same way in section for getting email alerts.  Instead of relying on the emails for notification, change detection allows you to create an RSS feed for each page you are monitoring.

3. Twitter - Setup a new twitter account that you can friend.  If you worried about privacy (people knowing which sites you are watching), set the updates to be protected so only “friends” can see them.   Have the alert twitter account friend you, log out and friend the account back with your main twitter account.

4. Twitterfeed -Take the feed from change detection, pipe it through twitterfeed so it will put update notifications to your “alert account”.   Now whenever anything has changed you can watch updates from that account and you’ll have almost real time monitoring of any web page.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

The other day I received this e-mail in my inbox:

Hi Creeva,

I would love a review of my site if you feel it would be worthwhile…

Twiggit is an automated service that lets your friends on twitter know what articles you digg. every so often we check for the last article that you voted for on digg, and update your twitter status to reflect this.  Options include the ability to only tweet the articles you submit rather than digg, pause the service at anytime, change the frequency of when to check digg, completly remove your twiggit account.

There is nothing like this in the market, we aim to bring digg and twitter closer together!

http://twiggit.org/

Any questions please let me know

Jason

It took me a few days to add this onto my plate, but I did get around to signing up for the website.    At one time I attempted to crosspost all of my online activities over to twitter - this got way to spammy.  When I set it up this account I configured itto send everything I submit on Digg to crosspost over to Twitter.  Since I sometimes will go on a digg spree and digg 50 stories in a day I didn’t want all of them to show up as tweets.   Props to them for thinking about this.

To test this out I submitted a recent story I wrote onto Digg attempting to find out a title about a movie I was tracking down.   The product works as designed.  All in all there is no frills, it’s single purpose - but single purpose that works quite well.  There are other methods of doing this such as importing feeds into twitter - but while Twiggit is essentially doing this at the back end - it makes it easier for people that would be intimidated by the level of understanding that this takes.  Twiggit is something I would send over so my parents could set up (if any of them used Digg or Twitter), versus something psuedo complex that I would have ot configure for them.

On the downsides, there website shows the following image:

If you look at the bottom of the image it says it received it 2 minutes ago from Twiggit.  This acknowledgment seems to be missing from my tweet which states submitted 1 hour ago from web.  I’m assuming this is a bug.

All in all Twiggit is not something groundbreaking, but it’s deserves it’s niche.  In the era we are moving into of micro-niches it fits in quite nicely.   With all the sites that integrate with Twitter, Twitter needs to start setting up a developer API similar to Google or Flickr so we don’t actually have to give these sites our Twitter usernames and passwords.  That however is a rant for another day.

UPDATE:

Originally the title mentioned Twiggit.com - which is the parent website of twiggit.org - the application is at twiggit.org.  Unfortunately I can’t catch everywhere I crossposted this story to, but I’m editing here on the source site.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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In part 8 I was going to write about crossposting to blogger, but that’s been delayed for the time being.  I’ll get back to that subject as soon as I get a chance.   Let’s move onto monitoring your crossposting.

Some people may have noticed that on my lifestream there seem to be duplicate posts.   This is because I’ve been working on adding all the RSS feeds from all the services in one trackable lifestream.   The benefits are that you can see and track how long information takes to get from one site to the next.   This also allows you to see where your crossposting is failing.   For example I’m noticing that my posts going to pownce are not getting through so when I get a chance I’ll look into what is actually causing that.

Lifestreaming all of our sites into one endpoint site that you can control and maintain allows all the little maintance to happy at a single glance.   We all know that crossposting is usually best effort delivery.  Not everything shows up in all the sites, but that happens because your not actively maintaining those sites and sometimes things just go wrong.

By having a single stream of all of your sites you are not bogged looking at RSS items for every site all together.  If I put all my feed items in google reader then it would take me an hour each day to get through all of them.  Having a quick glance allows the information to be singled out in a daily quick view.

Currently I’m using the wordpress lifestream plugin to handle my lifestream page.  It gives me the benefit of having a daily summary post generated automatically.  This allows me to have a permanent archive of all of my daily archives that I can go back search and vault away in my own life vaulting fashion.

Life is good.  Maintaining and monitoring in a single glance - that’s great.

Previous Entries in The Crossposting God Series:

The Crossposting God Series Part 1 - The Introduction

The Crossposting God Series Part 2 - Vox

The Crossposting God Series Part 3 - Live Journal and Derivative Sites

The Crossposting God Series Part 4 - Entry, Distribution, and End Points

The Crossposting God Series Part 5 - Myspace

The Crossposting God Series Part 6 - RSS Feeds to Crosspost

The Crossposting God Series Part 7 - Where Can You Post By E-Mail?

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

There was an article on mashable today questioning if ping.fm and hellotxt were helping the web world or hurting it.  I understand the authors point that if you are using these services that you are not taking an interest and active use in the social community that you are using these services to post to.   I can say from hits for ping.fm beta code requests on my blog, that lots of people are interested in getting access to ping.fm.   Now that it’s out of private beta I’m sure I’ll lose my number one spot in google for the term “ping.fm beta code”.  

If people want this what does this say?  It really means that we have diverse friendships.  We have communities that we want to share information with.   We don’t have time to manually copy or paste, nor do we have the time to try convince everyone we know to use a single service.   Since we can’t bring our friends to the service (much to the dismay of the social network providers), we take our information to them. 

We want to share our information, we don’t want to hoard.  I for example do all my writing on my main blog, twitter, and handful of other services.   Yet I have friends on almost every little social network out there.   Why should I be forced to chose between friends and the information I share with them.   Yes I’m sure some actual readers that are not into crossposting get annoyed over the repeated information on multiple services.   What about my friends though?   Where does the line of a healthy blogging business end and friendship cross?  My friends are the ones that inspire, the will always have the information directed towards them.    I am more then willing to take my information to them.   At what cost, a minor annoyance to literally a handful?

No one is forced to read my messages.   No one is forced to follow me.   No one is forced to my site.  If the author doesn’t follow ping.fm links, so be it.   I’m not losing what I truly care about.   Maybe when the a single network has all the features I want and 99.9% market dominance - then I’ll stop cross posting.   Until that time I’m proud to be a crossposter.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

It’s been a long time since I’ve beeen excited about a new browser.  Theoretically I’ve never been excited about a new browser that was announced.   I remember being excited when AOL resurrected Netscape - but that turned into a flaming pile of poo and Netscape lost dominance being THE browser to use.   Like many users at that time frame I used Internet Explorer 5 and at the time it was best of breed, then a new challenger arose.

The Mozilla foundation announced they were taking the open source bits of the Netscape browser and making a new slimmer browser called Firebird.  Because of issues of legal and copyright, Firebird was renamed to Firefox.   I’ve been using this browser since Firebird and I have had no reason to move to a different primary browser.   I’ve tried Flock and Safari, there hasn’t been a sticky reason to keep using those over Firefox.   I was excited, kind of, of the release of Firefox version 3.   But that wasn’t a new and different browser, it was more of the same.

With last nights announcement of Google’s New Chrome Browser, but they put up a nice little web comic that explains the features it offers.   The security, privacy, performance enhancements alone make this a must watch for browser.  WHen it is actually released later today, we’ll see how I feel then.

UPDATE:

Found a site that has some Chrome screenshots you may enjoy.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been working diligently like a good Google zealot and have slowly over the last couple months started migrating over to Google Docs.   The one thing that keeps tripping me up is the space they offer each document.  The space given is as follows:

So far I’m not hitting a barrier issue with Spreadsheets or Presentations (though I see hitting the presentation limit very soon) what I do have an issue with is the documents size and the PDF size.

The PDF support has just been added so I’ll give them a little slack on that, I think a good size in this web era would be 50 MB for PDF’s this should get you most any PDF around into your Google Docs size.  I have a couple PDF’s on my desktop that are close to 30 MB and being able to store them here would be a god send.   Until they do this won’t be my central PDF repository.

The document size though is really killing me, I have a ton of documents that are over 500k.  I have one detailing my home network that is almost 6 MB.   I think the documents need to be upped to 10MB.   that way the crazy bastards like me who use graphics and diagrams in their documents won’t have to worry about hitting this cap.

While we are on the subject though of Google Docs, why can’t there be better integration with G-Mail.  Theoretically it should be able to search through all my e-mail during a search and prompt me if I want to import this or that document into my Google Docs cache.

While Google has been great at adding new products over the years.  Even the ones that take off are nor properly maintained nor are they integrated with other related service soon enough.  Some of these products are around for years before proper integration takes place, when are they going ot be moving a little more away from 20% time for projects and focus whole teams on the integration side of the coin.

Anyways - /rant off.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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Introduction

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E-mail in the clouds.   Essentially back in 1996 when Hotmail was first released (in the pre-purchased by Microsoft era) the dawn of popular cloud computing for e-mail began.   The main issue was storage space.  I believe that Hotmail launched with 5 megs of storage space for all of your e-mail.   It is frustrating to know all the e-mail that’s been lost over the years due to inadequate storage space.   I now have single pictures in my email archive that are larger then 5 megs.   Times change and space get’s cheap.

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When Google released Gmail into the wild it was a game changer.  By offering 1GB of storage space it made it seem that you literally could keep your e-mail forever.   Other providers such as Hotmail and Yahoo were maxing out at 25 MB at the time, this seemed ridiculous in comparison.

Currently Gmail supports almost 7 GB of storage space and Hotmail and Yahoo went to “unlimited”.  I consolidate almost all of my e-mail to Gmail.

Data Types

To utilize e-mail storage you can attach any (supported) file and keep it in your mailbox.

Data Security

While you have to rely on a username and password to access your e-mail as the security barrier entry, if you want true protection from snooping it is suggested that you either get a web plugin that allows you to do encryption with Gmail, or keep your private messages encrypted and use them with an offline client.

Data Redundancy

Since you can forward e-mail from Gmail, I have it configured to forward all incoming mail to both my Yahoo Mail account and my Hotmail account.  If for some reason GMail loses my data or in the unlikely event Google goes out of business I’ll still be able to access my e-mail messages.

It is recommended that you keep an offline backup of your mail messages so they can be accessible while being off the grid.

Data Accessibility

With Gmail offering accessing via a rich web interface, a basic web interface, a mobile web interface, POP3, SMTP, and IMAP; it seems unlikely that you are going to find an Internet device that can not access it in some way or fashion.

Conclusion

This is the e-mail scenario that works for me.  Since encryption really isn’t ubiquitous across the board I don’t use it like I should.   Beyond that this scenario is highly redundant and should allow you operate from anywhere with a network connection without worrying about losing your data.

Previous entries in the Living in the Clouds Series:

Living In The Clouds Part 1 - Introduction To Cloud Computing

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• Creeva’s Shared items in Google Reader (4)
• Web Wandering Dump (0)
• Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0 (3)
• News dugg by creeva (0)
• Creeva’s Shared Items in Google Reader (0)

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

I have 10 Iminta invites, my crossposting has made it so I’ve jumped through hoops across multiple networks giving out my last bunch.  So here is what you have to do - you have to go to creeva.com and post a comment on this thread there.  The URL is http://creeva.com/2008/06/11/10-iminta-invites-available/

Make sure you include your real e-mail address in the proper field (which is hidden and I won’t share) so I have an address I can send the invite to.  The first 10 people get invites.   You don’t have to leave your e-mail address in the comment body.

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Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

I have 19 jaiku invites, my crossposting has made it so I’ve jumped through hoops across multiple networks giving out my last bunch.  So here is what you have to do - you have to go to creeva.com and post a comment on this thread there.  The URL is http://creeva.com/2008/06/11/19-jaiku-invites-available/

Make sure you include your real e-mail address in the proper field (which is hidden and I won’t share) so I have an address I can send the invite to.  The first 19 people get invites.   You don’t have to leave your e-mail address in the comment body.

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Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

I have 10 Evernote invites, my crossposting has made it so I’ve jumped through hoops across multiple networks giving out my last bunch.  So here is what you have to do - you have to go to creeva.com and post a comment on this thread there.  The URL is http://creeva.com/2008/06/10/10-evernote-invites-available/

Make sure you include your real e-mail address in the proper field (which is hidden and I won’t share) so I have an address I can send the invite to.  The first 10 people get invites.   You don’t have to leave your e-mail address in the comment body.

Here is a video overview of Evernote:

Direct link to Video on Youtube

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Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

I have 50 twine invites, my crossposting has made it so I’ve jumped through hoops across multiple networks giving out my last bunch.  So here is what you have to do - you have to go to creeva.com and post a comment on this thread there.  The URL is http://creeva.com/2008/06/10/50-twine-invites-available/

Make sure you include your real e-mail address in the proper field (which is hidden and I won’t share) so I have an address I can send the invite to.  The first 50 people get invites.   You don’t have to leave your e-mail address in the comment body.

To learn more about Twine take the overview tour.

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Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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Where can you post by E-mail?  Well this is the easiest of crossposting methods (especially if you use Blogger).  There are lots of plugins for wordpress or movable type that can send out your full post as an e-mail to another address.   In most cases you would send this to your own e-mail address so you had it for reference.  What about sending it to another site entirely?  What if that site could send it to another site?  You can see how this chain can work.   If you are using Blogger then you can send out your post to ten e-mail addresses.   This means that your post can replicate like bunnies.   What are some of the sites that can receive e-mail posts?  Let’s get into that.

The original Creeva’s World was hosted on Blogger at creeva.blogspot.com.  This is where I started writing and I didn’t want to abandon it after migrating over to wordpress.  This was the very first site I crossposted to from my wordpress blog.  Crossposting allowed me to not abandon my site and any readers that may go to that address, but I could enhance my own experience while keeping theirs the same.

Lifelogger is the “cooler” blogging service, at least that’s what they say.   I’m not going to use any blogging platform again that I can’t customize to the fullest extent.  Wordpress has spoiled me.   Though I do maintain a site there.

Unlike some major social networks (I’m looking at you Facebook and Myspace), Friendster does support e-mailing in your blog messages.

Blogr is just another blogging host that accepts e-mail.  Very blogger like, but crossposting friendly.

Evernote is unique unlock some of the rest of these sites, Evernote is a notebook service.   It allows you to e-mail in snippets (or use the desktop applications) to send in information that you can then share with your friends.  You can e-mail in text notes, audio, or video.

Busy Thumbs is a simple moblog site that accepts posts via e-mail.

Twine is similar to Evernote, but it’s about collections and community.   Think of it as sharing what you have with your friends.

Google Groups is a spot that I used to use as an online backup for my blog.   I have a private google group that only handles my own blog posts.   No you can’t join, not like you would want to.

I’ve just recently start crossposting to an old Yahoo Group that I used to moderate.   Mostly this is because I can share my thoughts with my friends that are still in that group, but that group is essentially dead.   So this is the only thing that it’s around for to keep me from pulling the complete axe on it.

Each Day is designed to handle your memories and save them so you can go back over your life.  It handles multiple media formats but all I’m concerned about is the e-mail option.

Multiply is a social network in the same vein as Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook.

Over at Vox I maintain a page to integrate with their community.  I’ve posted in the past how vox is a unique community and because of that I receive unique feedback.   They refer to their e-mail inbound service as moblogging.

I like to think of all of my blog posts as separate documents.   After working on this for awhile, I decided to start e-mailing all of my entries to my google docs account let’s me to search and repurpose documents a little easier then searching through the blog.   It’s my dump all account for documents.  I am annoyed that I can’t e-mail blog posts to Zoho Writer for redundancy, they only take documents as attachments.

When you are looking for a new site to crosspost to check and see if they have an option where you can post by e-mail.  Some sites may refer to this as moblogging.  Also remember to e-mail your post to yourself so you have a backup you can control.

Oh, I use the DJ E-Mail Publish plugin to push out posts from Wordpress.

In the next part of our crossposting god series we are going to cover Blogger more in depth.

Previous Entries in The Crossposting God Series:

The Crossposting God Series Part 1 - The Introduction

The Crossposting God Series Part 2 - Vox

The Crossposting God Series Part 3 - Live Journal and Derivative Sites

The Crossposting God Series Part 4 - Entry, Distribution, and End Points

The Crossposting God Series Part 5 - Myspace

The Crossposting God Series Part 6 - RSS Feeds to Crosspost

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• Life Caching is better then Life Streams (4)

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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RSS, I love RSS.   RSS makes crossposting easy.   It also allows me to read all of my news in Google Reader instead of jumping to 50 different sites that I used to visit once a day.  RSS allows users to subscribe to your site and read them where they want to, this may be good or bad based on your advertising style.  If you are like me and don’t really make a dime on your blog, then it doesn’t really matter.

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I use feedburner as a choke point for every web service that has an RSS feed (and I’m a member).   This allows me a couple things, the first is I can easily remember all the web services I sign up for.  The second thing is I have feeds that I can automatically plugin to lifestreaming services that don’t support the sites I use natively.

Through RSS I cross post my blog to Tumblr, Profilactic, Friendfeed, Suprglu, and any other life service I come across (just search for Creeva as the username).   Now At this point I’ve made feedburner to do all the heavy lifting and bandwidth intensive work for feed readers.  I even use my feed (a filtered version) to post notifications to Twitter when I have a new story published using the Twitterfeed service.

The other key thing to remember with RSS is when we get to the widget space.   Some sites don’t have an option for crossposting, they are completely locked.   You can however (in some cases) place a widget in your profile on these sites.  More times then not you can manage to place an RSS widget.  An RSS widget shows your current RSS feed items and allows you to place them on these profiles that otherwise have locked data.

With wordpress there is a plugin called feedwordpress that aggregates feeds and publishes them as items on your blog.   They keep trying to make this plugin better, but I can tell you it doesn’t seem ready for prime time yet.  I’ve tried every trick imaginable and I always end up receiving duplicate entries in my main blog.   Because of that I don’t use feedwordpress anymore, I may try in the future.  This would lead to the ultimate life caching solution, by allowing my blog to pull in all the data I generate everywhere else, and then crosspost it to all my friends across the web.  Unfortunately it’s a pipedream at this moment.

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In the next part of our crossposting god series we are going to cover services that allow you to publish by e-mail.

Previous Entries in The Crossposting God Series:

The Crossposting God Series Part 1 - The Introduction

The Crossposting God Series Part 2 - Vox

The Crossposting God Series Part 3 - Live Journal and Derivative Sites

The Crossposting God Series Part 4 - Entry, Distribution, and End Points

The Crossposting God Series Part 5 - Myspace

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Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

Image from Techcrunch in this article

It seems that Twitter is a being a little excited about the next big tech event, WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference - it’s an Apple thing).   I first got the news from the Techcrunch article linked above, but it seems that Twitter made an announcement that there will be no down time tomorrow - I call shenanigans.   They outlined the precautions in this article, among them are the following:

We’ve moved much of the load off our database by utilizing more memcache, employing more read-slave servers, and by fixing some bugs for improved efficiency. This work is in intended to help handle the load and keep Twitter up and running while Steve Jobs talks about all the new products and services Apple has planned. Of course these improvements will continue to serve Twitter beyond the WWDC as well.

Now it may just be me, but I’ve seen Twitter fail on slow days.  I know they have had experience with similar traffic load form other major teh events, but they crashed then.   While they may have some idea of the data they will need to handle, I’m not sure if they can truly appreciate the amount of data they need to handle when the tech world needs it’s geek porn instant updates.

Ironically there is no news if they are going to be taking updates via IM or SMS tomorrow, I’m betting not.   This way they get to handle a “larger load” - i.e. people that won’t be going to the site itself won’t be updating.  So it’s a win by not generating as much traffic.  Cheaters!!

For those that want to use twitter via IM to post updates (but you can’t receive them this way) I recommend trying Imified, it allows you to post to Twitter via IM even when Twitter doesn’t take IM updates through it’s standard channels.

Tweet, tweet.

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Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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The other day I wrote an article in which I briefly discussed cloud computing and how I accomplish it in my life. I wanted to start a new series called “Living in the Clouds” which goes over the functions that you can do to migrate over to a cloud computing setup yourself.

First we need to define what is cloud computing?  Cloud computing is placing and manipulating on the Internet.  While part of this is cloud storage, where you store your data online so you can access it anywhere, the other part is being able to use and manipulate your data anywhere.   Whether this is from your home computer, your work computer, or any other device you have access to an internet connection with a browser, this is computing in the clouds.

I wanted to outline what I’m trying to accomplish with this series.   What I want to do is go beyond the normal here is a cloud service, isn’t it shiny?  You can get that form anywhere.   What I want to work through in each section of this series is as follows:

Data Types: What type of data can you store or manipulate and what are the best services for that.

Data Security: How can you trust your data and the providers you are using.  How can you minimize the effect of data leakage.

Data Redundancy:  This includes redundant services with the same data, how to make your data portable, and how to back this data up.

Data Accessibility:  What devices and items other then web browsers can you manipulate your data with, what API’s are available.

I’m taking all of this from a perspective of what do I use and how do I use it.   I want to let you know what works for me instead of dovetailing in a goo goo gah gah review over something new and exciting.   If I don’t use it to a decent extent I will let you know.   I will include speculation and theory sometimes, but when I do I will alert you to such.

Hopefully this is a series you will enjoy.

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Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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Yesterday I couldn’t find my N810.  The hunt started on Sunday night and was reinitiated yesterday morning.   No N810, nowhere in sight.   As the night waned on yesterday I renew the hunt.  It was like I was looking for the great pumpkin Charlie Brown. Eventually it was found where you always expect ot find these things, behind a cushion on the couch.

This device (even when I don’t use it) has become so integral to my daily life that I flipped out more over that missing then I have or missing a wallet or cell phone for an extended period.   It may be the cost of the device, but I think it’s more the functionality and freedom it gives me (I’m sure it didn’t help that I was in the middle of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother E-Book).

It’s strange since i could go for weeks without seeing my ipod or my Palm TX, two things that this has replaced.   Now it’s working on becoming the extension of myself that fills the gap when I’m away from a laptop or computer.

I’m quite happy with it.

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Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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Mobile computing is becoming my newest fascination.  My previous fascinations included network based storage, network redundancy, and network security.   I enjoy making things do things that they were meant or designed to.   This is part of the sould that drives my curiousity to the edge of insanity and teeters over the maw of the great beyond.   I think eventually I will completely loose it and tumble into that gaping mouth that will swallow my soul and my body whole.

Mobile computing isn’t what it was even 3 years ago, mobile computing by traditional defintion means being able to computer while having the ability to travel.   Mobile computing devices were originally laptops, then PDA’s were taking over, now cell phones and custom Internet devices like my N810.   The question you need to ask is this still what mobile computing is, or is it being morphed into the new Internet buzz phrase “Cloud Computing”?

While I’ve been doing my crossposting series I’ve been thinking about what it truly means to be mobile and to work in the Internet cloud.   Ironically there is more to my online activities then my blog and how far reaching I can make the posts go.   I have pieces of me that exists in the cloud.  Part of this is my blog postings, sometimes this gives you an intimate side of me.   There is more that make up who I am and my goal is to see how I can migrate that online so I can access it any time and anywhere I have a net connection and an interface to the online world.

I have the basic or myself, my memories in the blog posts.  As I go on and digg further in my past more of these will survive through that.   What about everythign I create?  What about my pictures, my videos, my friends, my documents; will these things always be able to exist in the cloud?  While there are methods to storing these data types online, what about when a service goes belly up?  If a company goes out of business and you are relying on them with your data, where do you turn?  Even the great and powerful Google isn’t immune to canceling a service and dropping your data.   How do you stop that?  How do you save your data?  Is there even a reason for home storage anymore?

I can say just typing that out that there will always be a reason for home storage.   There will be private documents that you never want to show online.  Private thoughts that will always remain yours alone.   Until extrememely heavy encryption is ubuiquitous and tied soley to you, there is no reason to trust this data online.  If you don’t want ANYONE ELSE to ever see it, keep it away from the Internet.

I’m going to start a new blog series that investigates working in the cloud.  I know that this has been done before, but I think it will work nicely with my crossposting god series.  Why?  Because I’m going to focus on data redundancy and survivability in the modern Internet age.   I’m going to touch upon security and point out the insecurity that exists that most of us seem to ignore.

There are pieces of me scattered in teh clouds, I want some semblance and organization before I run into the hurricane.

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