Internetz

Newbies are still missing a few simple Twitter principles

Direct messages

You can't send a direct message to someone who is not following you. This means if someone follows you and you then direct message them asking a question, they can not reply privately if you are not yet following them.

Auto direct "thanks for following!" messages. Please don't do this

No one, but no one appreciates these lame automatic replies. Your "quality" followers won't click on the link to your blog. If they followed you it must be for a reason, assuming the follower follows the logical rule: follow people of interest to you. Further, the automatic message often makes no sense. Sending a "see my recipes and learn to cook" message to a famous chef is bound to make you look pathetic even if you could engage personally with the same person. Engage, don't enrage.

Should you reciprocate when someone follows you?

Only if you're willing to do the one minute of research needed to see if they are worth following. Why follow people who aren't of interest to you? It will just clog your daily reading with useless stuff.

Look at the their profile and look at what they've been saying over the past few days. Is this stuff you want to read? If so, follow. If not, move on. I'd also recommend you look at the avatar, web site, Twitter name. DOing all of the above only takes a minute. You don't have a minute? THen don't follow them.

The easiest way to set up a blog or web site is with Posterous. The important thing with a memorial site is allowing people to post as easily as possible.

I received news that my longtime friend drummer Paul Lagos passed away on October 19th, 2009. I wanted to find a way to gather people who knew him to honor his memory and help organize an event for him as well.

Setting up Remember Paul Lagos took less than 5 minutes and has allowed friends and family to post and comment without opening accounts. All they need to do is send an email to an address and their messages are posted immediately (or in this case, with moderation).

What a great, free way to make a memorial site happen. Kudos to Posterous, which I already was using for my "memoirs".

You have joined Talkshoe and you have set your 10-digit PIN.

Download X-Lite for Mac or Windows and install it as you would any program.

Set the SIP settings:



You need to put ideasip.com in the "domain" field. The others can be anything. Make sure "register" is unchecked as in the image and that "target domain" is selected. Click "Apply"





Now you are going to add a contact to phone the Talkshoe server and enter our conference directly:

Put Turkers Talk and anything you want in the tops fields, they don't matter at all.

Under "Contact methods", Select "softphone on the left and enter the sip numner on the right:

Here is the first part of the SIP number : 7463 # 22603 #

followed by your PIN (in the example image, it's 0123456789)

followed by the rest of the sip number @proxy.ideasip.com

SIP numbers (called URI) look like email addresses. Example: talkshoe@vuc.onsip.com is a SIP URI.

Another tutorial here

Join Talkshoe if you're not already a member

Search for Turkers to go to the page from anywhere on Talkshoe

This is the result of the search when we are conferencing only.

Now, click on Talkshoe PRO as below:

You should be prompted to download the software if you don't already have it installed. If you do have it installed, clicking this should start the software running.

I have a problem: Excess credit for calls to the USA. I need to find someone serving in Iraq who would know how to install a free software phone on a PC and set it up to use this credit. If the setup is successful, maybe we can even get further donations, but for now I've got about 24 hours worth of FREE calls for servicemen and women to telephone in the USA.

The challenge is to find the person who can set up the software. Please send a D message on twitter to 'voipusers' if you can help.

Or send an email to the temporary address: voip-zeeek (-at-) SneakEmail.com

Or, post a comment here (it won't necessarily be published, but I will see it)

Who do I talk to?

Several months ago I needed to export a blog from Serendipity to WordPress. WordPress has an RSS import that works fairly well, only the images required a little extra work. Yesterday, a former customer asked about exporting their blog content to whatever their new host is using. It turned out to be Movable Type. It also turned out that this company didn't know how to import data into MT.

I Googled for "import to movable type" and immediately got back the results that you can see if you do the same. The MT manual page and data format schema are the first two results.


MT uses a text delimited format for imports, for some reason not caring that most blog software can export to RSS 2.0. Why make it easy if they're leaving us, eh? Because you should care about things like this, that's why.

It took about 15 minutes to write a (bad) php script that would spit out the contents of the blog, which is after all a mysql table like most. Once I did that, a global replace for image URLs would fix most of those. Here's the basic idea (after the connect):

// First the query, which will obviously vary depending on what the source is
$sql="SELECT title,author,timestamp,body,extended FROM serendipity_entries";

$result = mysql_query($sql,$db);

while( $row = mysql_fetch_array($result) ) {
echo "TITLE: " .$row['title'] . "\n";
echo "AUTHOR: ".$row['author']. "\n";
echo "DATE: " .date("m-d-Y h:i A", $row['timestamp']) . "\n";
echo "PRIMARY CATEGORY: $primary_category\n";
echo "CATEGORY: $category\n";
echo "-----\n";
echo "BODY:\n";
echo $row['body'];
echo "-----\n";

etc.

Let me count the ways

#1: One real address is for known business relationships and trusted, clued friends and family. For clueless friends and family, use #2. This real address is for you. It's your professional address if you are a small business owner. It is not info@ or contact@ or any other role account. It is your name or some readable and recognizable variation of it. It can be first name only like fred@flintstones.com or the more formal fred.flintstone@test.com. Capitalization helps make it more readable such as FredFlintstone@heh.com. You do not use this address to inquire about dance lessons or sign up for the NY Times site. You'll use #3 for this.

#2: One or more generic address such as Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, etc. or even a paid account at something like http://Fastmail.fm. Paying will get you better filtering, more options and less ads. Gmail is probably the best free option around today.

#3: A method for easily creating "throwaway" emails. One such service is http://trashmail.net which is fine. I choose to use http://sneakemail.com which costs about $3 per month but has a lot of flexibility. Sneakemail lets you make up addresses as you go. For example, a newspaper site asks for an email. You give them your made up one from Sneakemail or the one from Trashmail.net which you set to expire in one week. Since both Sneakemail and Trashmail allow creation of addresses on the fly, you can actually have thousands (hence the title). I've certainly created several hundred.

If you keep control over your email by making sure you wait until you know the level of trust of your correspondents before revealing your true email (#1), you will lead a peaceful, happy and prosperous life, at least where email is concerned. Continue reading "You need at least 1,000 ... »