Getting the Picture with TweetPhoto

I’ve used TwitPic to link photos to my Twitter posts almost as long as I have been a semi-active Twitter user. I like applications that do one thing, simply and well. Sort of like Foxmarks before they ruined it, but that’s another story. TwitPic works perfectly for my purposes. It’s embedded within Tweetie, my preferred and only iPhone Twitter application. I also like the TwitPicGrid in small doses.

Today, I read about TweetPhoto, a new Twitter photo sharing application (isn’t it great when multiple developers fight to see who can give away stuff to more people?). At first blush it looks like TweetPhoto suffers from the internet stats obsession (who saw my photo, god-awful trending tags, etc.) that I most affirmatively do not share, but let’s take a closer look.

Once you sign in with your Twitter credentials, you get a nice looking upload screen.

That seems like a lot of work compared to the Tweetie/TwitPic integration or the integrated Trunc.it photo sharing via TwitterGadget, my Twitter app of choice. When you upload the photo, a box pops up asking if you want to push the photo to Facebook too. Nope, I don’t. The app then adds a Twitter post with a photo link to your Twitter stream.

OK, that’s fine and dandy. But it’s no different than TwitPic. Let’s see what else TweetPhoto has to offer. It shows me how many times my photo has been viewed, but (1) I don’t really care and (2) so does TwitPic. You can enlarge the photo, as you can on TwitPic. You can retweet it, which is a feature that’s not important to me, but one that TwitPic doesn’t have. And you can mark favorites.

Test Photo: 1970 in the Astrodome

It geo-tags photos posted via a mobile phone. I emailed a photo to test out the geo-tagging, but it hasn’t shown up on my TweetPhoto page 20 minutes after I emailed it. Hopefully that’s a glitch. If not, that’s not good. Time is everything online, just like offline.

The My Friends Photos tab leads to a page where you can see other TweetPhoto users’ photos and invite your friends to join (I don’t like my chances). You can supposedly show photos posted by your Twitter friends, but the app said I didn’t have any Twitter friends. It may be that this option only shows photos posted by your Twitter friends who also use TweetPhoto- which would be of limited value. The Public Stream looks like it shows other photos posted via TweetPhoto. Again, that’s not as interesting as TwitPicGrid. You can upload photos via email, which is nice, but, once again, not as easy as the Tweetie/TwitPic combination.

Navigation between those tabs was very Twitter-like (e.g., slow).

TweetPhoto is well-designed, and it has some neat features. But it’s not evolutionary enough to supplant the incumbents. Maybe like the rest of the online world, it is betting that the general population continues to flock to Twitter, so it can make its bones with new Twitter users. Maybe, maybe not. Only time will tell.

Evening Reading: 4/30/09

There are Some Who Call Me Tim Department: Here’s how 10 iconic tech products got their name. I didn’t know that Firefox started out as Firebird.

Adventures in Victim Retaliation: Here’s the hilarious story of how some dude punked the guy who stole his laptop via remote access. He should have let the guy keep it and started a blog with daily updates and live webcam feeds, particularly since the police refused to swing at the softball he lobbed at them.

Living Deliberately: This fellow suffered through 2 long weeks without Twitter in the name of journalism. I think there are pockets of Twitter that function as a free-form message board, if you manage your follows well, but the larger platform is without a doubt a self-promotion and spam fest.

Good Mashup Department: This is pretty funny. Star Trek, Lost style. The funniest Star Trek parody ever were the Star Trek cats segments in the old Robotman cartoon.

Stupidity for Traffic: This is a really stupid headline. Maybe Palm is having issues with the Pre, but why don’t we act like grownups and see how it works before we bury it. The crap people do for attention really amazes me (as I give them attention, thereby rewarding hyperbolic behavior).

Fringe Movies Department: Here’s a list of the top 10 classic midnight movies. I’ve seen all of them, except the first one. I love Rocky Horror, and I thought Eraserhead was worse than horrible.

Evernote Department: Ron tells us how to encrypt notes in the most wonderful Evernote. I like this feature, as I migrate more and more of my data into Evernote. Ron needs to stop posting new tips and answer my question about sub-folders.

The E Word: Here are some educational web sites for kids that are fun. Hey, where’s Webkinz on this list! Here are some good math apps for the iPhone or iPod Touch. And here are some Web 2.0 apps for learning.

What We Need Here is a Boycott: So PC World not only does the annoying partial feed thing, it also breaks up some articles into many separate pages. I’d love to know what they think are the essential iPhone apps, but I’m not going to click that hard. Here is my list, on one handy page. Without ads. Imagine that.

What is that Bald Spot in the Distance: The universe is so flat you can stand on a sardine can and see the back of your head.

Like Wimpy’s Hamburger Money: Looks like the final release candidate for Windows 7 will be here on Tuesday. Thankfully, I’m running the beta on an old laptop with no data I care about on it.

Welcome Wagon: I’m really glad to see Seth Finkelstein on Twitter (follow him here). I just wish he’d use it more and talk with other non-BigHeads like me. Twitter needs more Seths and less celebrities.

Defrosting Windows Department: Here’s a handy way to kill frozen Windows applications.

Good New Music: I dig this new Weinland record. Here’s Sunken Eyes, and here’s the Neilish I’m Sure It Helps. Buy it here.

Chiseled in Stone: The great Vern Gosdin died recently. I loved his eighties country records and The Gosdin Brothers’ Sounds of Goodbye is indeed an overlooked classic. Groover’s Paradise has an MP3. So does Setting the Woods on Fire. The Adios Lounge has a story.

TIVO Deathwatch Department: I haven’t updated my TIVO Deathwatch in a while because I thought TIVO was already dead. Now I’m holding out hope for a resurrection in the form of this new DirecTV TIVO. The question, of course, is how do we know this isn’t a Lucy football move, that will end up with DirecTV abandoning TIVO again?

I’d Be Happy with One: Here’s a list of 10 ways to be useful on Twitter. My list would be number 5 written ten times.

Scary and Funny: io9 has a good write up on Supernatural. Supernatural is a very well written show. The scary episodes are generally really scary (particularly for TV), and the occasional comedic episodes are almost always hilarious.

More Stating of the Obvious: In the second stating the obvious study of the week, some egghead got paid to determine that employees will find ways around corporate firewalls. Wow, I’d never have guessed that. I wonder if alcoholics drink more beer than meerkats?

No Gander in Sight Department: OK, this is the kind of bullshit thing that infuriates me. It’s perfectly fine to crap all over Christians, but say anything even remotely non-positive about any other group and the world stops for a gigantic protest. I’m no bible beater, but this sort of crap enrages me. Fully.

If This Isn’t an Omen, What Is Department: The Newspaper Association of America is going online-only.

Luke Needs to Study Harder. Some little girl gets inspired by some Globetrotters song or whatnot and rocks an IQ of 156.

Safety in Math: Here’s why you only have to worry about the little monsters in your closet.

Cry Baby Department: So Microsoft wants to give us all free PC security products, and we have to worry about other companies crying about it. Seems to me that any lawmaker who wants to force consumers to have to pay for what they could otherwise get for free isn’t doing us any favors. I say any company should be able to give away anything it wants, without penalty.

Celebrity of the Day: Everybody is bleating about Sarah Palin joining Twitter. She has over 10,000 followers and follows a whopping 45 people. When did Twitter turn into People Magazine?

Rich Men with Clubs: If you like golf, change sports. If for some reason you are unwilling to do that, this looks like an interesting golf game for your iPhone.

Once You Go Mac: Here’s a very interesting read about a guy’s switch to Mac after a lifetime of PC use.

What Will Office 2010 Look Like?

Here are a few early screenshots of Microsoft’s Office 2010. Candidly, I find the whole ribbons thing to be an exercise in chaos and frustration. But I’m not sure it would matter if they were as intuitive as dodging snowballs.

Why? Because here’s a screenshot of what I expect my Office 2010 to look like.

I don’t know how hard Google is chasing the corporate market, but if it has serious designs on attracting business users, it simply must implement some sort of tracked changes or version/compare feature. The absence of that feature is the primary thing keeping me from using Google Docs as my primary word processor at home, but it is an indispensable thing for business users.

Here are a few other tweaks that would make Google Docs more attractive to me.

There should be a way to synch your iPhone calendar and contacts with the corresponding Google app without affecting- or even touching- your Exchange synchs. I tried to synch my phone and the Google apps and ended up with multiple instances of the same contacts and events, which was a pain to sort out. In sum, it was an unmitigated disaster. I’m not going to risk jacking up my much more important Exchange synchs, and no big company is going to make it easy to do three-way synchs, for security/paranoia reasons. But it would be cool to have my iPhone synch separately with Exchange and the Google apps. It would even be acceptable to have contacts and calendar entries pushed out to the Google apps, without the ability to move data the other direction. But all of this needs to happen without doing anything unpleasant to the Exchange synchs.

Gmail needs to finally figure out a way to suppress the “on behalf of” business when your email is read in Outlook. I’d be happy to use the Gmail interface, but I want to use my existing email account. I’m not willing to trust Google as the sole archive of my old emails, but MailStore Home looks like an acceptable way to archive email locally.

It would also be great if Gmail allowed folders for us dinosaurs who are more comfortable with folders than tags. I think this is a design limitation, as opposed to a philosophical position on Google’s part, but I have no basis for that other than intuition.

Gmail should add an option to have spam deleted immediately, without ever being seen, and to have your trash folder emptied more frequently. I’d have it emptied every day. The best thing about Gmail is the spam filter. I want to supercharge it and let it make all spam invisible to me all the time. I’ve never noticed a legitimate email in my spam folder, but I don’t care if there is. If someone wants to contact me badly enough, they’ll write again.

I also need the ability to customize the links at the top of the Google apps page.

I’m not going to use Picasa for my photos, no matter what. I want to replace that link with a link to Flickr or Photobucket. I also want a link to iGoogle up there, as well as links to my internet starting page and my Content Master page. In sum, I need more flexibility to customize the page layout and content.

Finally, Google needs to take a page from Lost and pledge not to give up on Google Docs like it did on Google Notebook and various other apps. It’s difficult to migrate to a watering hole that could dry up at any time.

I’m close to going all Google Docs all the time, but I need a little more incentive.

Pogo-plugging into a Private Cloud

My Pogoplug came today. I opened it about 15 minutes ago. Here’s the skinny.

Setup was almost as simple as advertised. I plugged the Pogoplug in, connected it to a network switch in my study, and got an immediate green light (that’s good). I connected a new Seagate Free Agent hard drive, and activated my Pogoplug via the Pogoplug web site. With a couple of minor exceptions, it was as easy as could be:

1. It was hard to read the tiny Pogoplug identification number on the attached sticker. A quick look with a lighted magnifying glass revealed that what I thought was a letter was in fact a number (no big deal- it took maybe a minute longer to reenter the number); and

2. I had to right click and “safely remove” the hard drive from my computer after I formatted it before attaching it to my Pogoplug. I never, ever do the safely remove thing, but the help box in the Pogoplug activation window suggested I do so (also no big deal, though it cost me an extra 10 minutes or so).

Once you get everything connected, you can log in to your private cloud via the Pogoplug web page.

The interface is perfectly acceptable, even if not perfect.

pogoplug1

The only semi-bummer is that you can’t drag items into a new folder via the web interface. If you download the Pogoplug software (see the link at the top), your Pogoplug drive will appear in Windows Explorer, just like any other drive.

There is software for Windows and OS X and a beta version for the four people who actually use Linux for this sort of thing. From there, you can presumably drag and drop uploads and drag items into folders. Very nice idea, but I couldn’t get it to work. It could be another router problem. If so, this is getting old fast.

Sharing via your Pogoplug is a mixed bag. You can share entire folders with selected people via an email authorization procedure. A neat feature is the ability to share the contents of a folder via an RSS feed. Here’s mine. You can’t share items individually (only via sharing an entire folder), and you can’t generate direct links to serve media in blog posts and web pages. At a minimum, Pogoplug needs an embeddable media player, like the elegant one at divShare.

There is a free iPhone app, which installed quickly and allowed instant views of the files on my Pogoplug, over wi-fi and 3G. I could easily access my photos and MP3s. Uploading a photo from my iPhone to my Pogoplug was easy and fast. I didn’t see an option for uploading anything other than a photo.

Overall, I am pretty impressed with Pogoplug, and it will definitely replace my current private cloud setup.

Evening Reading: Spring Cleaning Edition

This afternoon and tonight I am beginning on my quest for a more manageable email inbox, Delicious inbox and, most importantly, Google Reader starred items list. Here are some specifics:

1. Email: I am a terrible emailer. Anyone who is related to me will attest to this. So my email gets backed up for weeks. I have emails from people I know, bands I’d love to write about and developers that wanted me to preview their now public applications sitting in my inbox. No more. I’m going to move things out of there from now on. Folders or the trash can. That’s my plan.

2. Delicious: I am not a big user of Delicious, but it is a good way to save sites I see outside of Google Reader and for other Delicious users to send me links. If anyone- as opposed to only other Delicious users- could send me links via my Delicious inbox, I’d use the service more. As it is, without a major overhaul I think Delicious is dying on the vine. As such, I need to get stuff cleared out of there. For the time being, I’ll still check my Delicious inbox. One useful thing about the Delicious Firefox add-on is that it notifies you of new items in your Delicious inbox.

3. Google Reader: Google Reader, both natively and as a part of my Content Manager page, is a big part of my online experience. I use starred items as my primary holding place for both things I want to read later and items I want to write about later. I wish I liked Read It Later better, so I could move my deferred reading list there and save the starred items for writing topics. As is, I have hundreds of starred items, and they are about to get un-starred. Really interesting things will get added to this post for your benefit. Everything else is going to be tossed out, and I intend to clean out my starred items list at least weekly. We’ll see how it goes.

So here’s the stuff that made the cut.

Maybe I should use more of these. Right now I use Windows Live Writer, and that’s it. I think my list would be a lot different. Or I could come up with a bunch of form emails. On a related note, here’s someone’s list of the top 10 tools for your blog or web site. Be careful with those iPhone site optimizers. Many people, including me, would rather read a site in its regular format via Safari than to be forced into an alternate iPhone format. I used Intersquash here for a while and it worked great, but I decided I didn’t want to force people into the iPhone layout. Last and maybe not least, here are 25 blogger widgets.

Trivial Pursuit has come to the iPhone. It was one of our favorite family games when Mom was alive. My sister generally kicked out butts, but we kept trying. Wheel of Fortune is also available. So is everybody’s favorite bar game, shuffleboard.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff at Rules of Thumb.org. For example, did you know that “a farting horse will never tire; a farting man is one to hire”?

Here’s a free way to make nice business cards at home.

Photography Aisle: Want to take better portraits? How about a free plug-in to make your photos look like film? Here’s another app to help mask the crappiness of the iPhone’s camera. Or you can stitch a few crappy iPhone photos together and make a bigger crappy photo. Here are 10 cool to bizarre effects you can add to your photos, and here are 10 more image generators. If you, like me, think that Photoshop is harder than writing limericks in Latin, here are some tutorials. And some more, for watercolor effects. And if you make it through all that and still have your senses about you, here is someone’s list of the 100 most popular Photoshop tutorials.

How about some cool magnet tricks?

If you don’t want to write a script to protect your email address from spammers, you can use Scrim. Here’s mine, so protected.

Now I know why I was so underwhelmed after browbeating my mom to buy me some seamonkeys. I was expecting them to look like the picture on the back of the comic. Of course that disappointment was mild compared to those x-ray glasses.

PBS has a site for streaming some of its shows. So now you don’t need a TV to watch boring shows (Ken Burns’ excellent films excepted).

I sure wish I’d had an iPhone in high school. We had to buy the Cliff’s Notes, and sometimes they made us read books that didn’t have Cliff’s Notes. How wrong was that?

Ron’s Evernote Tips has a regular supply of great ways to use the excellent Evernote application.

So YouTube has a new design for channels. I’m not sure what channels are in that context. Let me go look. . . . OK, here’s my channel, with the paltry amount of videos I have added. I like the fact you can edit the page from the page, sort of like My Yahoo. I don’t like the fact that some asshole label keeps making YouTube strip the music from my little videos. I think I’m done with YouTube until it outlives the music industry. Maybe I should take a look at Fliggo.

Here’s a roundup of VHS to DVD converters. I say if you have a ton of VHS tapes you want to convert, buy one of the Panasonic dual decks and if not, take the tapes to a shop and have someone do the conversion for you.

I’m finding out that I do a lot of stuff wrong on Twitter. Another thing I do wrong is unfollow people who don’t follow me back, unless it’s a big media news source or someone really, really interesting. Here’s an app that can help with that. I like the way it loads over your Twitter background.

If you are a southpaw like me and two of my three kids, you might be interested in this mouse. A C-Note is a lot for a mouse, but using a right-handed mouse is like sitting at those right-handed desks in primary school.

If you want a personal cloud, there’s the really hard way, the not quite ready for primetime way, and what looks like the very easy way. I’ve ordered a Pogoplug and will review it when it arrives.

Recall my pet rules. I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t like pets. And I am scared to death of people who are obsessed with cats. I love cats. I just don’t base my life on mine. I’m crazy enough on my own.

Yes, my email gets backed up. But I don’t really think Tweetdecking it would make me more efficient.

If the new iPhone comes out this summer as rumored and hoped, I told Cassidy I’d give her my current iPhone. What I didn’t tell her is that I would put a big heap of this on it first. If she doesn’t like that, there’s always this.

Daily Booth makes it easy to do that picture a day thing. I don’t know that I’d ever do that, but I think it’s a cool little app.

ReadWriteWeb does love the jargon. Cloud agents?

jjra This may be the coolest album cover I’ve ever seen. I can’t find any songs to sample, but you can hear snippets at Amazon.

Here’s a list of iPhone accessible news sites. I think dedicated apps is the way to go, but if not, an iPhone friendly design is a decent alternative.

Here’s a less than impossible way to make a favicon.

I love the idea behind Songfacts, but it bums me out that one of my favorite REM songs was written as a tribute to Leonard Cohen. Sorry, but I do not get the whole Leonard Cohen thing. Just like I think MacArthur Park is a stupid song (though I dig Jimmy Webb), despite the arguments I hear from some of my musician buddies.

This article sheds some light on why Taj Mahal‘s publishing company is called Cheraw S.C., Inc. I’m from Cheraw, and have always wondered about that.

Shooting the Bird: More on the Blog Publishing Problem

I’m working with some good folks at Microsoft to resolve the photo publishing problem I wrote about the other day.

This is a test post from another computer, but over the same internet connection.

There is (or is not) my little test photo.

Initially the photo would post to the Blogger photo server (which I don’t generally use), but not to my server. I got this error:

(Publishing Error) A publishing error occurred: 200 Type okay.
227 Entering Passive Mode (xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
150 Data connection accepted from xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; transfer starting.

So I tried to post on my laptop, using an ATT wireless card.

It worked (there is the long awaited photo).

Which means the problem is caused by my network. Hmmm. Let’s see if it’s my computer or my internet connection. . .

Here’s another photo- this time I’m posting on my desktop, but using the ATT wireless card.

ftperror321

This also worked, which means that the problem resides in my internet connection, not on my computer, not in Live Writer and not on my web server.

I’ve narrowed it down, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I guess I need to look at the router settings.

When I disable my router’s firewall, the photos publish correctly. But I obviously don’t want to permanently disable my firewall, so I need to configure my router to allow Live Writer to publish these pictures. It’s odd that Live Writer can publish the text of the post (via Blogger) but not photos. It’s also odd that I can publish photos via an FTP client, but not via Live Writer.

There’s a Thousand in Every Crowd

Despite the fact that it often feels like a mashup of Deepak Chopra and P.T. Barnum, I continue to enjoy Twitter.

But Twitter has a growing content problem, that if not checked will ultimately reduce Twitter to an online version of your email junk mail folder.

For starters, the volume of MLM, get rich quick and grow your follower count posts (3 versions of the same thing) is light years beyond absurd. Add to that an endless supply of self-help posts, many of which are either nonsensical to the point of self-parody or disguised spam. And then there’s this one dude who obsessively posts the same links day after day, which doesn’t particularly annoy me except that I can’t figure out why he does it. If he doesn’t have an angle, he’s the most dedicated linker in the history of html.

One conclusion I have reached after spending a good amount of time on Twitter is that there are thousands of people trying to sell the same thing to each other. MLM opportunities, get rich quick schemes, self-confidence, karma, etc. There are vendors everywhere and, as far as I can tell, not a customer in sight.

I also wonder how potential Twitter advertisers feel about this demographic. If everyone is selling, who is left to buy?

But among all the noise, there are many benefits. I have seen links to interesting articles, beautiful photographs and great songs. Most by people who, if you can believe it, aren’t trying to make money off of me or sell me some get (them) rich quick scheme. I have also made contact with developers who have answered questions and provided assistance with respect to their applications. In return, I try to add value and fun by posting links to interesting articles, and by posting music. I have been doing an alphabetical survey of new wave music, via the Blip.fm/Twitter integration. It takes time to find the music, and to add short commentary to each. But it’s fun and I’m building a good playlist over at Blip.fm.

But maybe I am misusing Twitter by doing all that. Maybe I should forget about content and focus on MLM and how to increase my follower count and whatnot. Because in the midst of all of the Twitter chaos, it seems that posting music makes me a spammer.

I’ve received many positive responses to my music posts, and a grand total of two complaints. This dude and another guy from Houston, thereby proving what I already sort of knew- that I live in a town of music haters. Not really, but it’s interesting that anyone who has spent 5 minutes in the great Twitter flea market can get all pissy over a series of song posts, manually done, with commentary (to be fair, he later said that maybe spam wasn’t the best word to use). He un-followed me, which is exactly what he should have done if he didn’t want to see my music posts, and this little issue was resolved. But I think this exchange is indicative of the bigger content problem Twitter is facing.

In sum, there is a huge spam problem on Twitter, but in the words of Lynyrd Skynyrd (another annoying music reference), I ain’t the one. Yet it seems I’m not the only one being labeled as a spammer, just because I’m not trying to game Twitter or sell people a bill of goods.

Another tech blogger who isn’t trying to make money on Twitter is Louis Gray. It seems that the Twanalyst application, one of the many barnacles that cling to Twitter’s traffic-rich API, believes that Louis is spamming Twitter, in part because he doesn’t retweet (e.g., repost) a bunch of other people’s posts. That is even more absurd that these muddy sticks squawking about my music.

Louis presents a logical and iron-clad defense of his Twitter philosophy:

In my opinion, begging for retweets, and retweeting is simply lazy, just like live tweeting a conference panel is lazy blogging. It’s the equivalent of forwarding e-mail, or copying and pasting someone else’s blog post to your site and adding a short link. If Twitter is truly conversational, as many argue, then repeating what someone else has said doesn’t do much to add to the conversation.

Amen, brother, although I don’t think Twitter is as conversational as we would like, or as many would have us believe.

Interestingly, Twanalyst doesn’t think I’m a spammer. It says I am a “renowned obsessive cautious” personality with a “chatty academic” style, whatever that means.

All of this nonsense demonstrates that the rules and expectations on and about Twitter have been turned upside down. If you blast links and mindlessly retweet posts by others, you’re viewed as adding value. If you obsessively post about MLM, getting more followers and making money, no problem. But if you post actual content or- God forbid- music, you are a spammer. Or at least an annoyance.

At the beginning and end of the day, I don’t care if someone thinks I am spamming- just stop following me. And I’m not going to unsubscribe from Louis’s blog because some application thinks he needs to change his Twitter approach. But I think Twitter needs to develop a plan for encouraging good content. So far it looks, at least from the outside, like Twitter is solely interested in traffic, at the expense of just about everything else.

At some point the coolness factor will fade, and Twitter will have to rely on good content.

Like music.

Frustrating Live Writer – Blogger FTP Problem

All of the sudden, when I publish a blog post with pictures in it, Live Writer is unable to transfer the pictures to my server via FTP. When I try to do so, I get the following error. I have a screen cap below, but Live Writer replaced the picture with the word “ftperror,” which is the name of the picture I am trying unsuccessfully to post.

I had to upload this picture to Photobucket
and then link to it. What a pain in the ass.

I can tell by looking on my server that Live Writer is creating a directory on my server the way it is supposed to, and there is an appropriately named file in the directory, but the size of the file is 0 bytes. I used a jpeg for the screen cap below to confirm that it’s not a png problem. It’s not, as Live Writer replaced that screen cap with its name too.

Here lies the symptom, but what is the problem?

Sometimes the 0 Filesize is a permissions problem, so I tried changing the permissions in the target folder on my server. No dice. So I restored the permissions to their previous levels.

For some reason, I’m starting to think this may have something to do with the way Live Writer names the image files.

I was able to upload the files via FileZilla, my FTP application, without a problem. This indicates that the problem resides within Live Writer. I tried to test that theory by uploading some pictures to my Photobucket account via Live Writer. No dice. Same error message, but I couldn’t get any FTP client to display the proper directory on Photobucket- the connection times out when trying to retrieve the directory listing. So I don’t know for sure.

Here’s my test picture, so I can keep trying until I figure out how to fix this nightmare. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I think Live Writer is the most useful and feature perfect application out there. I have become very reliant on it, so I need to fix this problem.

birds42
If you can see this image,
I have fixed the problem.

The mysterious thing is that I didn’t change any settings prior to the problem arising. On the one hand, it’s strange that Live Writer can post blog posts, but not pictures. But my blog posts are published to my server via Blogger, whereas the pictures are set up to post directly to my server via FTP. I deleted all the FTP information in the Live Writer blog account settings a couple of times and reentered it. Live Writer was able to access the directories on my server at that point. Somehow, when it tries to transfer the picture file, something goes wrong.

This makes the formerly simple process of publishing a blog post very difficult. It requires me to separately upload the pictures and then link to them. It was much easier to upload the pictures at the same time I publish the blog post. Little pain in the ass problems like this that suddenly spring up for no apparent reason drive me crazy.

But my devotion to Live Writer requires that I continue looking for a solution. Time for a Twitter SOS.

Evening Reading: 4/21/09

Online Reality Show: Penelope Trunk makes a lot of excellent points about the uber myth that is blogging as a way to make a living. People continue to confuse the software platform that we call a blog with the guy next door pounding away at the keyboard. They are very different things, and most of the high traffic “blogs” are either old media sponsored, new big media owned or online pioneers who made a gigantic space grab while the rest of us were still trying to decipher stock quotes in the newspaper. Meanwhile, some continue to hype the myth while one of the few who hit the blogging lottery is realizing that the best way to make a small fortune through blogging is to start with a large fortune. All in all, it’s a case of wishful thinking overwhelming horrible odds. Like Vegas, only not as fun to watch.

Wally Bangs Department: Wally has a flyer from Cantrell’s, one of my old Nashville hangouts. I saw a lot of good music there back in the day. Oh, and one night some biker chick flashed me there. That was awesome. Really, for those who wonder if I’m kidding. The other best writer on the net is Will Truman. Here’s one of the best blog posts I’ve ever read, and here’s his latest masterpiece.

Deep Art Ment: I love old album covers by obscure bands like this. Here’s another one by the same band. Listen to them @ YouTube. Not bad.

What to Do with the Empty Bag: Mashable has a fun read on protecting your online identity. So how does one becomes an “online identity expert”? Is it an apprentice thing, like Castaneda and Juan Matus, or is there a degree in online identity? There’s nothing as wonderful as watching “experts” fill the perceived vacuum of a new area of popular interest. I wonder whatever happened to the hordes of Y2K experts? I obviously agree with the personal branding idea of a central online location that connects to other websites. Too bad the entire social media movement is designed to prevent that from happening.

Sour Grapes Department: This is going to sound whiny, but only because I am whining. I continue to be amazed at how many “big” blogs say the same stuff I’ve already said over and over. Yet I rarely get included in their conversations. On the other hand, it’s mostly an equal, unequal playing field. Very little about the blogosphere is based on merit, so most unaffiliated bloggers are in the same leaking boat, thus proving again the point Penelope makes above. Louis Gray‘s well-deserved profile being one of the few examples where hard work alone pays off in the blogosphere. I’d love to see him become the next self-made blogger to get hired by one of the “big” blogs.

Mac Mini Department: PC World takes another look at the Mac Mini media center. Dave Wallace thinks this might help. I hacked my Mac Mini as soon as I got it. It’s a tough little computer.

Bad Java, Bad: Trying to sneak software onto computers is so nineties.

Windows Agony Prevention: Here’s how to make Windows Explorer stop treating every single folder like a video collection. Restore the Windows Explorer columns to sanity. This drives me crazy.

Double Edged Logic Department: A Techdirt commenter makes a very good point about the newspapers’ Google complaints. If Google is robbing them, then they are robbing the people who actually do the newsworthy things they write about.

That’s Not Funny, Bone: Here’s everything you need to know about the funny bone. Which runs along the runs along the humerus. Get it?

FriendFeed Chaos: FriendFeed is simply too chaotic unless you live on it, which I don’t. It desperately needs RSS output for filters, to allow you to output filtered content to other locations. More than that, it needs an RSS feed that contains only the most recent one or two items that each of your friends have posted. Until then, it’s useless to me. It got a lot of well-deserved buzz when the beta was released, but it needs to give users a way to slice, dice and export content.

Freaky Photo of the Day: ID this interesting photo for a free subscription to Newsome.Org.

I Had No Idea: That CompuServe still existed. CompuServe was my initial gateway to the pre-internet. I have fond memories of the Sports Simulation forum back in the day. I was so awesome at Front Page Sports Football. Great career play implementation, that has still not been matched.

Content Master Page (2.0)

After using Version 1.0 of my Content and Twitter Juggernaut Page for a couple of weeks, I decided it was time to knock it down and see if I could come up with something simpler and better. Among the areas I wanted to improve were:

1. A more unified interface, on a single page.
2. One instance of Google Reader and one instance of TwitterGadget.
3. An easier way to add items to my Google shared items.
4. Avoidance of the flashing/font reset problem I was experiencing when posting via TwitterGadget.

After trying several iGoogle hacks and scripts, some hand-written, I decided to trash iGoogle completely and do something I never thought I’d do again. I decided to use. . . a frameset. Why? Because by using frames, I could solve all four of the above issues, and enhance navigation too. By creating a frameset with a menu frame across the top, a 40% width TwitterGadget frame on the right and a 60% full Google Reader (not the gadget) frame on the left, I can do several things that improve my content reading, blogging and Twitter posting.

I can keep a TwitterGadget box open and always visible on the screen on the right hand side. This is critical for dragging links into the message box for commentary and posting.

By taking all of my content that was previously in the Google News gadget and the Feeds Tab Reader gadget and adding them to organized folders in Google Reader, I can access all of my content in one, unified window. If I am reasonably current in my feed reading, there is little need for scrolling, but if not I find scrolling to be preferable to stacked windows. All of this is done in a single instance of Google Reader and one instance of Twitter Gadget.

Because I now have the full Google Reader open in the left column, I can add items to my Google Reader shared items directly, instead of having to use the bookmarklet. Plus, I can access my starred items more easily.

And by having the Twitter Gadget in its own window, I avoid the annoying flashing/font reset problem.

In other words, I went through old school to get to new school.

The drawback to Version 2.0 is that it requires some work to organize your feeds within Google Reader. I don’t always want my traditional news feeds to be in alphabetical order. For example, I want Google News “Top” items to be at the top, not the “Business” items. To solve this I added a numbering convention at the front of the renamed feeds (the ability to rename a feed being one of Google Reader’s best features).

I was also able to add a navigation bar at the top of the page to allow me to return to another of my most common destinations.

At the end of the day, I have a content reading and Twitter pushing page that is smaller, faster and easier to use (click the image below for a bigger view).

If you’re interested in experimenting with this setup, here is the frameset. You don’t have to have server space- you can open the file from your hard drive. If you don’t want to do that, you can use the Newsome.Org Content Master (Update: now depreciated) page. If you are logged into Twitter and Google, your information will appear in the appropriate windows. All I ask is that if you use that page, please Tweet about this post and subscribe to the Newsome.Org RSS feed.

There is still room for improvement. I would like to get rid of some of the screen waste on the Google Reader Home page, such as the entire right hand column, but all that unnecessary stuff is hidden once you start clicking on folders and individual feeds, so it’s not a huge problem. Additionally, Google needs to implement native column resizing in Google Reader.

What I really want is for TwitterGadget to add a feature to copy the headline, followed by a shortened URL (and not just the URL) when you drag a headline into the message box. That one feature would reduce Twittering time by over 50%.

Otherwise, I’m pretty pleased with this setup.

For now.