I’ve been on Twitter for a long time, but I never really knew what to use it for. Until Facebook introduced mobile updates, I used it as an easy way to update my status. But that was unusually constraining on what I could and couldn’t use it for (since all Status updates had to fit the format “Nishant is…”). So I always knew that I wasn’t really using it the way I should/could.

But my experience following the twitterings of some folks, and my meeting a number of avid Twitterers over the weekend at a Techset cocktail party at the Gansevoort, has made me rethink how I am going to leverage Twitter going forward.

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I’ve been long enough in the professional world to know the drill of how to exchange contact information. Usually it’s an exchange of business cards, with the occasional email address or cellphone number written on a napkin thrown in. However, at this event, all I heard was “you can follow me on twitter at…” or “my twitter handle is on my business card”. I felt so web 1.0!
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Anyway, I’ve decided to try and leverage Twitter as my micro-blogging platform. No more having to wait to get to my computer to write a full-fledged blog post (blogging by email feels too clunky). And no more trying to figure out how to think up complete sentences, suitably composed paragraphs, and lucid thoughts. For things that need only a few words and possibly a link, Twitter does the trick better than anything I know. The ability to do it all by text message is pretty convenient too.

So the upshot is, there is going to be one more way to follow my random musings. If you are on Twitter, you can easily follow me by visiting my profile and clicking on “Follow”. If you don’t want to sign up for yet one more social thingamajig, then you can subscribe to an RSS feed of my twitter postings here. I promise to try and keep it interesting (For a sample, check out the “My Lifecast” widget in the right sidebar of this blog for my most recent tweets).

Now if only Twitter manages to stay alive…

If you are blogging about your personal life, you must read this article/story by Emily Gould, talking about what she went through as someone who converted a hobby/passion for blogging about her life into a job at Gawker. It is a bit long, but a terrific read and tremendously insightful and touching. And it reflects on the impact our blogging passions can have on the people close to us, something I know a little bit about.

You know what, I am a pretty patient when it comes to technological challenges. I will work around most issues, and do more than what an average joe will put up with. Primarily, this is because I know how hard it is to design good software.

But I pretty much hit my limit today. The source of my frustration – the completely inane support capabilities built into Microsoft Vista (and I suspect the previous versions as well). Let me explain the neat little conundrum that Microsoft decided to test my patience with.

For the last couple of days, my laptop has been acting up, where all of a sudden the screen will go black, and pretty much the only thing I can do is hard power down the machine. After a relatively light weekend (by my standards), today things just imploded, where the machine would barely boot before it would conk out.

So I started the machine up in “Safe Mode” and started trying to figure out what to do. Going on some forums pointed me to a few knowledgebase articles, that recommended some hotfix downloads. Here is where the fun started.

You can’t download the hotfix unless your windows version is validated as being genuine. But the activex control on the windows site relies for this on a service running on your machine, and that service will not run in “Safe Mode”. Trying to start it gives you a nice little message telling you to start the machine in Normal Mode. But I wouldn’t be trying to download the hotfix if I could do that!

I tried downloading the hotfix from another machine, and transferring it to the laptop. But then installing the hotfix failed because of “Safe Mode”. So I needed to do something else.

I figured the best approach would be to update the display driver. NVidia’s website was no help at all. Their “beta” utility to detect my display type failed, and their manual download mechanism wouldn’t locate the right driver. Further searches on forums suggested that I use windows update to check for official driver updates. Going to the website recommended that I use the utility on my machine. But again that machine does not run in “Safe Mode”.

What did I end up doing? I kept rebooting the machine till I managed to start it in Normal Mode long enough to run windows update and download and install the updated driver. That was a fun 5 hours. Seems to be working so far, but I have to say that it really made me reconsider the quality of Microsoft’s engineering. I don’t understand how they could have created a process with these kind of contradictions built into it. Maybe all those guys develop on Linux or OS X.

It’s always great to watch a movie that you just have to discuss and argue about after you have finished seeing it, one that creates a discussion or debate. ‘Untraceable’ is just that kind of movie. It is a pretty standard, but surprisingly good, whodunnit. But the real nugget of the movie is the premise it wraps itself around – the idea of a killer that uses the involvement of web viewers to kill his victim, each viewer contributing on a miniscule scale to the torture and death of the victim.

The idea that people would log in to a website that promises a murder, with the viewers being the executioner, seems far-fetched on the surface. But is it a dystopian view of the culture that we see on the web already? Is it that far-fetched in a world where ‘Fear factor’, ‘Survivor’ and video websites like Stickam and LiveLeak thrive?

As Tanu and I argued, it is a big leap from the vision in ‘Hostel’ to the vision in ‘Untraceable’. But the premise hinges on the idea that all humans are capable of unspeakable atrocities. ‘Hostel’ portrays people who want a very hands-on experience with torture and death. ‘Untraceable’ exploits the fact that the anonymity of the web and the feeling of desensitization will lead people to tacitly participate in torture without fully comprehending that they would. The further you get away from the actual act, the more you feel that you are not really involved, and my experience on the web tends to validate that. People who will be too shy or hesitant to be rude in real life can be really vitriolic on the web, whether it be on blogs, comments or online forums. So is it really hard to believe (as the movie portrays) that 17 million plus people would log in to witness someone tortured to death, knowing that by being on the site, they are 1/17,000,000 parts involved?

Part of our pop culture is that we feel that simply being a viewer does not mean anything. There is little comprehension for the fact that by being viewers, we are endorsing the very thing we view. We can’t bemoan the paparazzi treatment of our favorite stars, and then turn around and buy the latest gossip rag. We can’t view shows like ‘Jackass’, and then get angry when kids emulate those shows. By participating in the process, we are endorsing it, and that is the issue.

I believe anonymity is a big part of this. If you did not feel the social anxiety of being judged for what you do, you would be far more open to doing things. And that also applies to doing bad things. Consequences are what keep our most base instincts in check, and the web allows us to not deal with the consequences of our actions. That is the danger that the movie throws out there for us to consider.

Shelfari is this web 2.0 social network for book lovers that allows you to build a shelf of books you are reading or planning on reading. It allows you to post reviews of the books you read, and connect to people with the same interest or get an idea of what people with similar tastes are reading. It is kinda cool.

I have been maintaining my book shelf on Shelfari for a while now, and installed a shelf widget on my blog a while ago. Shelfari recently updated the widgets they have with some really cool looking new options. I couldn’t resist updating my widget to a new one that fits in nicely with the look and feel of my blog (it’s a black oak bookshelf; check it out on the right). What do you think?

One thing I did realize: I am not reading as much as I should.

As I detailed in a previous post, I have been getting really bugged with not getting the Technorati tag cloud to work for me. So today I finally decided that I’d had enough. I wanted to use something better, that I had some more control over, to render me a tag cloud. And since I had to make a switch anyway, I decided to go with the best out there and put in the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for my Wordpress blog.

I have to say, I was impressed with the work that Christine Davis has done. The plugin is well designed with some great features. Installation was a breeze. I simply downloaded the zip file and installed its contents into my wordpress wp-content/plugin folder. After activating the plugin, a new menu item called “Tags” showed up under the “Options” menu in the Wordpress admin console. From there, I could configure how I wanted the plugin to behave. There are a number of configuration options available, giving you full control over how you want your tags to behave.

The only problem was that none of my previous tags were being recognized. Previously, I was using the SimpleTags plugin to add tagging capabilities to my blog (I had just deactivated it prior to installing UTW). But that simply looks for tagged content in the body of the post itself and renders the tag links appropriately. UTW is a little more complex in that it creates a separate table that holds the tags for the various posts, and of course this table had nothing in it at this point. This is where one of the most impressive features of UTW came in, and really illustrates how much work has been put into the design of this plugin. Under “Options->Tags” is a link for “Manage Tags”. On this page is a button called “Import Embedded Tags”. Clicking on this button ran a script that examined all my previous posts and extracted all the tags into the tags table. It worked like a charm, and all my tags were picked up.

Having gotten my tags table populated, I was now able to put in my new tag cloud, by simply adding the following code to my sidebar

<?php UTW_ShowWeightedTagSetAlphabetical(”coloredsizedtagcloud”,”",”15″) ?>
where 15 can be replaced by the number of tags to show

The tag cloud worked right out of the box. It looks a little different from the old one, but works soooo much better. It is a beautiful thing when software, any software, no matter how big and complex or how simple and seemingly trivial JUST WORKS. As a software architect I can really appreciate that, and kudos to Christine for the best Wordpress plugin I have ever come across.

I am so much happier now.

Having set up my blog in [tag]technorati[/tag], one of the things I felt like doing was putting a [tag]tag cloud[/tag] on my page. A tag cloud is a special way of displaying the [tag]tags[/tag] that you are using on your site. It displays them in variable sizes, with the more often used tags being bigger and therefore more prominent. It is a neat way of visually communicating almost instantly what you are talking about most, and I had seen a number of blogs sport a tag cloud. So I decided that I must have one.

The tag cloud on technorati was a simple javascript to put into my sidebar. Alas, it didn’t work for me. The code gives absolutely no control over it’s appearance, and I couldn’t use a stylesheet to style it. Also, the width seemed to not work properly. The result was an ugly white block of text, one tag per line, that looked horrible. So that came off in a hurry.

I then proceeded to search for tag clouds. I found a really neat one at “Warping On“. But it said it required [tag]Wordpress widgets[/tag]. Having no idea what that is, I proceeded to research that. Turns out that widgets is a neat little plugin from a group at Automattic that allows you to put dynamic content into your sidebar. But to use it, your theme has to be widget-enabled or widget-ready. Looking at their instructions, I got a little daunted. I am still not comfortable with the whole theme coding thing, and having just spent so much time perfecting the skin of my blog, I wasn’t about to rip it up again. So that killed that idea.

As of now, I still haven’t found a good way of getting a tag cloud onto my blog easily. We’ll see how it goes.

[tags]Tech, Web 2.0, Blog customization, Blog skinning[/tags]

I figured that the best way to get my blog out there was to become part of the tagged blog universe. For that, I started to explore various [tag]blog search engines[/tag] and [tag]folksonomy[/tag] websites. Without a doubt, the best known one out there is [tag]Technorati[/tag]. I was already part of that world with my professional blog. So I decided to add “Demerzel’s Echoes” to the Technorati universe and get started [tag]tag[/tag]ging.

Claiming my blog on Technorati

The first thing I noticed was that there was no way for me to create a chinese wall between my professional blog and my personal blog. If I claimed my personal blog using the same account I used to claim my professional blog, they would get linked, and people would be able to cross-over. Not what I want. If someone makes an effort, they could figure out a link between the two, but I don’t want to make it easy for someone. So I ended up creating a new account on Technorati. Not ideal, but manageable.

Wordpress Technorati plugins for Tagging

Claiming my blog was really easy. The harder part was figuring out how to get the tags into my post. I started searching through the Wordpress plugin codex to find a way to integrate Technorati with my blog. There are a large number of choices, but the documentation is a little hard to digest. The information you get from the codex page is never enough, and you have to go to the plugin page to (hopefully) understand the detail of the plugin. Even that is not always good enough. In the end, I installed the “[tag]Simple Tags[/tag]” plugin. Installing the plugin and following some instructions to customize the toolbar for writing a post means I can now easily tag words in my post by simply selecting the text and clicking on a button. The only caveat: I have to switch from the WYSIWYG visual mode to the code mode to get the tag buttons. Still not what I wanted, but close enough. Once I had that installed, I was up and tagging in no time.

Favorite Me!

Adding the “Add to Technorati Favorites” widget to the sidebar was a breeze, thanks to code that the Technorati website provided. I decided to modify what they gave me by replacing their default image with an icon and text link to keep the look and feel of my “Subscribe” box consistent.

[tags]Tech, Web 2.0, Blog customization, Blog skinning[/tags]

Having gotten my blog up and running, I figured that the next logical thing was to somehow connect it to the [tag]social web[/tag] that is all the rage now. I figured it would be a a simple task. But I was quickly overwhelmed by the array of options. So I decided to start with something simple: [tag]Photo Sharing[/tag].

I spend way too much time on my photographs. My website has been lovingly prepared with all the care that my wife says I should give her. And while I plan on continuing to maintain my website as my medium of artistic expression, I did want to find a way to integrate my photographs with my blog that would not require me putting in additional time (I agree with Tanu, my website takes up enough time).

Photo Sharing on Flickr

First I had to find a photo website with good features in the social sphere, and everything pointed me towards Flickr.

[tag]Flickr[/tag] makes it real easy to upload and manage my photographs. Besides uploading through the browser, it gave me a desktop uploader tool that I can use to upload a whole bunch of photographs (a very useful feature when I am uploading a trips worth of photographs). I was even to set up a way to upload photos from Picasa (which is what I use to manage photos on my desktop at home), but that relies on the “upload by email” feature, which is slow and annoying, and prone to failure. I am surprised that there isn’t a better integration between [tag]Picasa[/tag] and Flickr available as a plugin.

Photo Badges & Slideshows

The Flickr APIs mean that there are a host of widgets/gadgets out there ready to use. My research revealed two main ways to display photographs from Flickr – badges and slideshows. [tag]Photo Badges[/tag] (because of their small width) are more appropriate for sidebar displays, while [tag]slideshows[/tag] are better for displaying photographs as part of a blog post or page.

Flickr gave me a pretty decent badge right away, and that is what I have in the sidebar to the right (showing photos from my “From My Travels” set). I loved that all I have to do is manage the photographs in the set and the badge will automatically update with the changes.

Alas, I couldn’t find a [tag]slideshow widget[/tag] that does the same. The best slideshow site I found out there is Slide.com. It makes it very easy to connect to Flickr, select a photo set and use it as the basis for a slideshow (they also support other photo stores, like MySpace). They have a decent array of formatting options, and they give all the necessary code to embed the slideshow in a post. However, after that things started to get complicated.

Firstly the slideshow, once created, is fixed. Updating the photo set doesn’t have any impact on the slideshow, which to me indicates that Slide is copying my photographs over to their servers from Flickr (not a true mashup in that sense). Secondly, the code generated by Slide doesn’t sit well with Wordpress. If I paste the code in and save it, it works. But if I now go back and edit that post/page without touching the slideshow code, something gets screwed up and the slideshow doesn’t render properly. I put a slideshow on the “Travel Addict” page of this blog, and every time I edit that page, I have to retrieve and re-paste the code for the slideshow. It is getting to be pretty annoying. If anyone has a fix for this, I would love to hear it.

Blogging Support

One of the better features in Flickr is the ability to [tag]photoblog[/tag] directly from within Flickr to your Wordpress blog. You can setup your Wordpress account credentials within Flickr, and every time that you see a photo you like, you just have to click the “Blog This” button. You can write the post within Flickr and submit it, and it shows up in your blog right away.

That is also the problem. The post doesn’t always look the way you want it to look, and the fact that it shows up immediately means that you have to immediately go to your blog to edit it. Kind of ruins the benefit of blogging from Flickr. So I started to look for a solution to the problem and found the “Flickr Draft Post“plugin. The activated plugin recognizes posts coming in from Flickr and saves it into your drafts instead of publishing it, giving you time to get back to it for editing and publishing at your convenience.

It also took some debugging to get my blog set up. For some reason, the Wordpress type for the blog selection didn’t work. Moveable Type worked better for me.

[tags]Tech, Web 2.0, Blog customization, Blog skinning[/tags]

Having figured out how to use the [tag]wordpress theme[/tag] editor to modify the theme of my blog, I arrived at a different idea on how to make the look and feel of my blog my own. I was going to design my own layout and look and feel, find a pre-existing theme that has most of the same characteristics, and then customize that theme after deploying.

I spent a few days designing my blog layout. Having just gone through that exercise for my [tag]MySpace[/tag] page, which I had since shut down, I decided to use that look here. It was a pretty good one, and had most of the characteristics that I wanted – clean layout, few colors with a dominance of black (which fits in with the color scheme of my website). I also liked some aspects of the boxed content layout so prevalent on MySpace. So that got me to a basic look for my blog.

I then proceeded to search for a theme that was close enough to what I wanted. The colors didn’t really matter in this. What mattered were the characteristics of the theme:

• 3-column layout
• Horizontal list of pages in the site (automatically generated and not hard-coded)
• Archive Calendar
• Categories list and Recent Posts list
• Search box
• Clean, boxy layout

I didn’t find any themes that had all of these, but I did find one that was close enough. I applied the theme and proceeded to go to town on the stylesheet and sidebars in the theme editor. The original theme didn’t have a [tag]page banner[/tag], but that was just simple HTML in the header.php file. Soon enough I was closing in on my vision for my blog.

Interesting sidebar: In editing the files for the theme, I found that some of the files contained hidden links to an adult website. Turns out that this was how the theme designer was making money from the creation of this theme. Everytime a page on a blog that used his theme would be launched, it would hit the adult website, earning his account money. Sneaky. Something to watch for when you download and apply a theme.

To customize the stylesheet, I simply loaded a page from my blog and looked at the source code. Sure enough, most of the content was suitably tagged with classes or ID’s. This made it very easy to navigate the existing stylesheet and make the necessary changes. Once I got the hang of the overall style structure, I was able to add my own classes to the stylesheet, and use it where necessary.

Creating the [tag]horizontal list[/tag] of pages at the top was the most challenging aspect of this process. This is because the macro that returns the links returns it as an unordered list. This restricts what you can do with it with regards to layout, and also forces you to deal with the differences between IE and Firefox (the two browsers I test against). A valuable resource for trying to format lists that helped me immensely is “[tag]CSS Design[/tag]: Taming Lists” by Mark Newhouse.

Anyway, a few more tweaks and I was closing in on my design. However, there were still some things missing. The theme I downloaded did not have the “Recent Posts” section in it. So I had to search for Wordpress macros. And since I was there, I decided to look and see what other useful macros I could find. I found that documentation for the macros was a little uneven. Some are well-documented, while others are missing key pieces of information. So after a while I gave up. Thankfully, the recent posts macro is pretty easy to use and well-documented. Once I had that, I was good to go.

Next up – adding some cool widgets to my blog.
[tags]Tech, Web 2.0, Blog customization, Blog skinning, blog layout[/tags]