Tech and life

Since I signed up with Twitter about two years ago, I’ve been using it mostly to share the best tech links I’ve come across during the day, and I also see some of the tech news stories tweeted by people I’m following. But Twitter isn’t my number 1 source for finding news stories – no, it’s still Google Reader. And for me, Twitter may not be the best place to share links any more as we’ll see below.
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If you haven’t used bookmarklets before, they’re just useful pieces of JavaScript code which you can bookmark and which let you be more productive by simplifying tasks. Installing a bookmarklet is as simple as just dragging the bookmarklet link to your bookmark region or right clicking on the link and bookmarking it. I’ve made a folder for bookmarklets on my browser bar to keep them all together. Here are 15 of the most useful bookmarklets I’ve come across. If you think they may be useful to you, just drag the link at the start of each section across to your bookmark region and try them out.

BigTweet: Lets you share links on Twitter with your followers without leaving the webpage. It automatically shortens the link in the process and captures the title and any highlighted text. Of course you do have to log into your Twitter account through BigTweet to allow it to tweet your link but I’ve had no problem here in the year I’ve been using it. This is possibly the bookmarklet I use the most.

TwitterKeys: A pop-up box gives you symbols which you can copy and paste into your tweets.

Pagezipper: If you’ve ever come across articles split across multiple webpages, this bookmarklet combines them into one long scrollable page. Saves a lot of time clicking and waiting for the next page to load.

Clippable: Reduces all the clutter from a webpage and makes it easier to read. Adverts, sidebars, etc are all removed and you are left with the text and images. There are other bookmarklets which are very similar like Readability.

Printliminator: Lets you select what you want to keep on a webpage before printing the page – you could of course print to a pdf using say doPDF which I’ve blogged about before.

Clip to Evernote: Use this bookmarklet to save a webpage to Evernote, the popular notebook app. I know Evernote has a Webclipper to clip text from webpages or entire webpages, but I find this bookmarklet useful in combination with Clippable mentioned above to just clip the text and images to Evernote and leave the rest of the clutter behind.

Read Later: Save a webpage to your Instapaper account to read later. You have to register with Instapaper to use this.

Save webpage as pdf: Sends a webpage to pdfdownload which converts it to a PDF. You can then download the PDF.

Subscribe with GReader: Quickly subscribe to a blog in Google Reader with this bookmarklet.

Show RSS Feed: Try this bookmarklet if your web browser has trouble detecting the RSS feed associated with a site. It will show you the full contents of that feed and also give you options to subscribe in your favourite newsreader.

Delicious Talk: See how many people have saved a particular page on Delicious and what tags they have used to describe the page.

Map that address: Highlight an address on a webpage and get a map showing its location.

List all Links: Lists all links on a page in a pop-up window.

Translate: Uses Google Translate to display the content of the page in English.

Youtubian: Go to a video on YouTube and click this bookmarklet. The page will reload with the video, a search box on the right, related videos below, and download links for Flash, MPEG, and mobile versions of the video also on the right. Click on the Expand link at the top of the page to revert back to the original YouTube page.

If you want to search for more bookmarklets, there’s a directory at marklets.com and here’s a site with over 100 useful bookmarklets for better productivity.

Hope you find some of these useful. Drop a comment on any I’ve missed that you like.

I came across a really useful blog post recently at Online Tech Tips on transferring your TweetDeck settings to another computer. It’s well worth a read if you are using TweetDeck on say a laptop and desktop and basically it involves copying two important files from your TweetDeck folder under Application Data to the same folder on the second PC. On my PC, the files are:

c:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\TweetDeckFast.[large number]\Local Store\preferences_techandlife.xml

c:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\TweetDeckFast.[large number]\Local Store\td_26_techandlife.db

However, it occurred to me that this method can also be usefully applied to restore your TweetDeck groups should you accidentally delete a group which you have spent a lot of time and effort defining. If for some reason you close a Group column, there is no way back unless you have backed up and can restore these two files. The file td_26_techandlife seems to be the important one containing the Group data.

The scrolling arrow and the remove column button are pretty close together in TweetDeck and not very distinctive so it is possible to select to delete a column when scrolling through your tweets:

Admittedly, if you chose to delete a column you get a warning that this is irreversible, but it’s nice to know that if you do mess up, your hard drive dies, or you decide you want to restore a deleted Group, it can be done.

So I suggest you add these two important files to your regular back-up routines and restore them to the above folder should the need arise.

Edit: Version 0.26 of TweetDeck introduced synchronization of groups to multiple computers so it’s now possible to backup and restore your columns. Click the Settings button in the top right corner of TweetDeck then click the Sync tab. Register for a TweetDeck account to sync and backup your columns.

It’s becoming increasing difficult to cut through the noise in Twitter to get to the information you want – particularly as you may typically be following  hundreds or thousands of people now.

I came across a great video tutorial last week by Jesse Newhart and featured on TwiTip on how to use TweetDeck more effectively to keep track of the people you are following. It’s worth having a look at.

But it struck me that one of the simple search principles shown there could equally be applied to the twittersphere as a whole not just who you are following, particularly if you’re looking for interesting links on a particular subject. This in turn may help you to find new people to follow.

So just choose the keywords you want to track and combine these with the keyword http. For example, to see what is currently being posted with the keyword ubuntu, just open a Twitter search client. You could use Twitter search but I’ve chosen TweetGrid as you can simultaneously track a number of search terms with this. Enter your search query like this:

ubuntu AND http

This will bring up all the tweets with the word ubuntu and which also contain a link to a website. In the example, I’ve also had it track tweets with the keyword wordpress and which have web links:

I know it’s really simple but I hope you might find it useful if you’ve been wondering how to search for content or new people to follow on Twitter.

If you have any other quick tips on searching the twittersphere, please drop a comment and if you’ve found this tip useful, please Stumble, Dig, tweet or save on Delicious. The links are below. Thanks.

On Twitter, you can basically tweet personal stuff, or useful content, or you can answer other tweets, promote your blog posts or retweet what you’ve read. Most of you who have seen my Twitter profile will know that I usually tweet or retweet useful web links and I just wanted to take a minute to explain why.

At first sight, this might seem a boring thing to do, endlessly passing on a site here and a site there. I decided from the start to tweet useful content and tweeting web links seemed the best way to do it. Before I started in Twitter, I was, and still am, a big fan of RSS feeds. I currently have 145 RSS subscriptions in Google Reader focusing on Tech and Blogging. I realised that a lot of people were blogging in their spare time, putting in a lot of time and effort to bring me excellent free content. Having started this blog, I now know how much work is involved. I felt that filtering and tweeting the best web links on a daily basis would be a good way to pass on useful content and also give something back to all those bloggers by hopefully directing people to their sites.

I actually enjoy passing on useful information – I did this for years on tech forums before Twitter came along.

I don’t actively go out and look for followers these days and haven’t done so for some time, so I know that it’s the content which is driving people to follow me. Okay, my numbers aren’t huge, but at least I know that my followers aren’t just follow-backs who haven’t looked carefully at my profile. They’ve all seen a useful tweet or retweet, hopefully checked my profile and decided to follow me.

With a bit of luck, they’ll all like my blog posts as well and subscribe to the RSS feed (at the top right of this page!), so in the end, the efforts I put into microblogging will hopefully be rewarded with a group of people who want to read my blog.

On the chance that some of you have not arrived here from Twitter, I try and tweet the best of what I see in my RSS feeds each day – usually 4 or 5 tweets. This can be anything from social networking, blogging tips, SEO, CSS and WordPress plugins through to PC troubleshooting, PC utilities, freeware and on to Ubuntu. Things I’m interested in.

If you’re new to Twitter or may have missed some of my old tweets, please go back and look at my Twitter profile. There’s a complete record of my tweets there. Retweet anything you see there if you like. And follow me on Twitter if you like the content.

Useful links (added 21 February 2009):

Being a Useful Twitter User

What’s the best time to reach your followers on Twitter? When they’re awake of course. But that’s easier said than done. Don’t assume that all your followers are in your time zone. Twitter is global. Most of my followers are in the USA and Canada, although I do have a significant number in Europe, the Far East, Australia and some in the Middle East. So one tweet is going to catch some awake and some asleep. Of those awake, some will be at work and some at home. If I just tweet in the evening, I will only reach a particular subset of my global followers, mostly in the USA. Here’s a map showing world time when it’s 7pm in the UK. As you can see, the USA is wide awake while Australia is asleep or just waking.

Map credit: www.worldtimezone.com

Now here’s a couple of tweets from problogger last Friday afternoon (in Australia) on a very important subject:

As you can see, while it was 3.40pm in eastern Australia, the time in the UK was 4.40am – definitely not beer o’clock for me! In fact, when it was my beer o’clock, Darren I’m sure was safely tucked up in bed.

Of course there are different types of tweet. ‘What I am doing just now’ is just that and it’s tweeted once. But if you have some important content to get out to your followers, for example a really good link you’ve found or a new blog post, you’ll probably have to retweet the message. Having said that, I am currently following about 130 people and I still make a point of reading every tweet. That’s the beauty of Twitter. You can quickly scan each tweet and see if it’s of interest and worth responding to. However, as I follow more and more people, there will come a time soon when I’ll have to follow groups of people more closely with TweetDeck and just dip into the rest when I have time.

So to maximize my chance of a tweet being read by someone who doesn’t have me in a group on TweetDeck, and who is following lots of people, and also to deal with the global nature of Twitter, I find it’s worth repeating important tweets up to 4 times in about 18 hours. Typically, that would be evening, late evening, next morning and then the afternoon. Hopefully, that will catch the different audiences. But that’s enough, I don’t want to turn anyone off.

This from Guy Kawasaki

Tip 9: Repeat your tweets. Try this experiment: take your most interesting tweets (as measured by how many people retweet them, perhaps) and post them again three times, eight to twelve hours apart. I used to think that people would complain about repeating tweets, but I’ve never had a complaint. My theory is that the volume of tweets is so high and most people check in at about the same time every day, so people don’t notice repeat tweets.

Many people are restricted from using Twitter and other social networking applications at work so it might be worth retweeting so as to catch your followers in the evening,  or even at the weekend for those that have more time to relax and catch up with the twittosphere then.

I also find it’s worth repeating any important weekend tweets on a Monday evening in case they weren’t picked up at the weekend.

‘Twitter is a great tool to get your target audience discover you, your blog and the value your blog creates. It helps establish a link between you and your audience in a non-threatening way and can be a great part of your online blog branding and marketing strategy.’ Marko

I thought that was very well put. Here’s a few tips I’ve picked up in the last couple of months working with Twitter. If you haven’t already tried them, I hope you’ll find them useful.

1. Add your name to Twitter directories. Two good directories are Twellow and Just Tweet It. Find the categories that best suit what you tweet about and add yourself there. You can also look in those categories for people to follow.

2. Find people to follow. I use Twubble and Twannabe for this. Twubble checks who your followers are following and picks out people who you may want to follow yourself. Twannabe checks who your nominated Twitter ‘hero’ is following and you are not so you can add them as followers.

3. Follow some of the big names. Follow people like Darren Rowse, Jim Connolly and Chris Brogan. You will probably pick up followers on the back of following these big guns and you may also find they have interesting tweets.

4. Find local people to follow. Use TwitterLocal to find people in your area worth following.

5. Follow these people for tech news. If you’re interested in tech updates, cool websites and applications, follow these: @makeuseof, @guardiantech, @Net_Feed, @Neo_Win. Also @techwatching but this one has frequent updates.

6. Longer tweets. The killer feature of Twitter for me is the 140 character limit. This means your tweet has to be concise. It also means that you can scan tweets from your followers and quickly get the drift. However, if you occasionally need to tweet more that 140 characters, use TwitBlogs or TwitterMail.

7. Post pictures. Use Twitpic to share pictures linked to your tweets.

8. Use TweetDeck or Tweetree as your Twitter client. Both these have advantages over the Twitter website for viewing your tweets, direct messages, etc. The big plus of TweetDeck is that you can define groups of people who are most important to you so you don’t miss any tweets amidst the twitter noise. Be careful not to close the group column though as you will then have to redefine that group when you next reopen TweetDeck. You’ll also have to install Adobe Air to use it. Tweetree is probably my favourite client at the moment. Its key advantages are first you can see photos on Twitpic or Flickr or videos on YouTube directly in the client. Second, shortened links in tweets are shown in full form so you can decide whether to follow that link or not. It doesn’t do groups yet like TweetDeck but I believe that’s in the pipeline from looking at the feedback tab on the Tweetree site.

9. Use BigTweet to tweet direct from a website. If you want to tweet about a good website you’ve found, you can do it directly from BigTweet. You can tweet up to 240 characters with this. It even shortens the website URL.

10. Subscribe to TwiTip. TwiTip is one of the best websites for learning how to use Twitter more effectively. Well worth subscribing to in your RSS reader.

11. Easily change your twitter background. You can improve the background on your Twitter profile and show links to your other social networks using Twitbacks or MyTweetSpace.

12. Check your twitter grade at TwitterGrader. I’ve just made the top 50 in Scotland! You can check anyone’s grade here.

13. Put a twitter counter on your blog sidebar. Go to TwitterCounter and get a Twitter counter badge to add to your sidebar.

14. Put your latest tweets on your blog sidebar. Use TwitStamp to generate a cool image showing your Twitter details and latest tweet in your blog sidebar. Or use the Twitter for WordPress plugin to display your latest tweets on your blog.

15. Build your community. If you follow these tips, they should help you build a good community on Twitter. You don’t have to follow back everyone that follows you. If someone follows you, take a close look at their profile and see if their content is of interest to you. If it’s too far from what interests you, you don’t have to follow them. If they unfollow you because you haven’t followed them, indeed if anyone unfollows you, don’t worry about it. This is all about building communities of friends who want to read your tweets, who you can ask questions of, and who you want to hear from. It’s not really about numbers in my opinion.

I hope you find these tips useful. If there’s any tip or tool you’ve discovered and find essential that I haven’t mentioned, please drop a comment below. Also if you like this post, please share it on Delicious, Digg it, Stumble it or even tweet about it. You can use the ShareThis link just below this post. If you find this post useful, you could also help by linking to it in on your own blog. You can follow me on twitter at @techandlife. Finally, why not subscribe to our RSS feed to have all our posts sent directly to your news reader.

Photo credit: swanksalot

First, a Happy New Year to one and all! I hope you’ll eventually be able to look back on 2009 as a great year where you achieved all you set out to.

Here’s my short list of tech targets for 2009:

1. Move to Ubuntu. I currently use Windows XP and although the signs are that Windows 7 is going to be an excellent OS, I believe that Linux, particularly Ubuntu, is finally becoming a real alternative for us all. I’ve already installed Ubuntu 8.10 without problems and now have to find the best Linux alternatives to my essential Windows applications. If anyone is interested, I’ve listed these Windows apps on my About page. If you haven’t tried Linux but want to give it a go, I hope you’ll follow me through 2009 as I overcome all the hurdles in making Ubuntu my main OS. I hope we’ll all learn along the way.

2. Improve this website. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed starting out with WordPress and I want to become more proficient with it in 2009. I have a few ideas including trying new themes and plugins and I’ve recently installed a Contact page on this site. If anyone has any thoughts on how I could improve this site, please drop a comment below. I can take any criticism!

3. Build my @techandlife Twitter community. I’ve really enjoyed my 3 months with Twitter and it has undoubtedly helped drive traffic to my blog. I’m looking forward to building my community on Twitter. My next blog post will be about what I’ve learned so far with Twitter.

4. Build my business Twitter community. Spurred on by the success of @techandlife on Twitter, I want to use what I’ve learned so far to integrate Twitter with my small business. I believe Twitter is going to be really important in 2009 in driving traffic, so I must start to build my business presence with it.

Well that’s my main targets. What do you hope to achieve in 2009? Drop a comment below.

I started with twitter back in September but wasn’t quite sure what to do with it then. I knew I didn’t want to provide an endless stream of tweets on what I was doing. That’s fine for some but I wanted to post some useful content.

So for the past 2 or 3 weeks, I’ve been gradually getting more and more into twitter, as I find my niche and start to attract followers. I’m at 30 followers now but hope to hit my next target of 50 followers soon.

I was really heartened by a blog post by Darren Rowse at Twitip a couple of days ago where he asked the questions that were important for me:

1. What value are you creating for your followers on twitter? What’s in it for them?
2. What need are you fulfilling for your followers?
3. What problem are you solving for your followers?

And this blog post emphasizes how the correct attitude will help build followers. For me, twitter is not about tweeting what I am doing but hopefully providing something useful for any followers I might have, either information, advice or support. I enjoy passing on information and tips. Twitter will be a kind of extension of this blog where I will try and post useful tech and life stuff in a microblog format. I’ll try and tweet on useful online applications and services, PC troubleshooting, PC security, WordPress blogging, and learning Linux among other things. I’ll be asking questions too.

If you’re interested in tech tweets, please follow me on twitter. I’m techandlife there. If you look there you can see my 70 tweets so far and decide if I’m worth following. If you haven’t tried twitter, I recommend you give it a go. It’s free, very easy to use, and it’s fun! You’ll get some great advice on using twitter at Twitip.

I’m always looking to follow people too, so if you think there are people I should follow, please drop a comment below.

Useful links (added 21 February 2009):

Being a Useful Twitter User