Everything Free Software

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I remember when I first signed on to Facebook.  It took up a lot of time.  Finding friends, scanning for people from high school, playing scrabble, etc etc etc… Then I said to myself, “Self, your spending a lot of time on this website.  Time to walk away.  Ooh look, Twitter…”  Tweets ensued.  Since then I’ve only gone to Facebook here and then to waste a few minutes between tasks and such.  I thought i was done with Facebook.

Until I downloaded the app for the iPhone.  I’ve gotta say, it’s really, really good.  It’s unbelievably easy to update your status (one click), post pictures (two clicks), and just about everything else it 3-5 clicks.  You can view your friends statuses and pictures, write on their wall (or your own).  There’s no Facebook app support, understandably, but it’s hard to knock it for that.  It’s really everything an iPhone app should be, delivering a great user experience.  And of course, it’s free!  All that spells out 5 stars in my book!

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So you’ve got an iPhone. You’ve got a Twitter account.  If only you coule put them together.  Well, if you haven’t figured it out yet, you can!  There’s a few apps out there that you can do this with, and I’ve tried all of them.  Twitterriffic was ok.  It has all the features of the other stuff, but it was ad supported and I was that happy w/ the interface; it kept dragging to the bottom.  Not impressed.  Then I tried Twittelator.  It was a little better.  Decent interface, could post pictures, etc etc.  But if you ask me, Twinkle has them all beat.  It has a very intuitive interface that mimics the Twitter web interface very well, and it also has very smooth picture posting and reply mechanisms built it.  Very very easy to use.  Five stars if you ask me, with the other two getting maybe 2-3 stars.

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Got a login feature going, and I’m able to post from it successfully.  I’m also able to see my timeline, which is neat.  Now with just a little prettying up and I’ll have something that basically clones the twitter interface! YAY ME!  Gotta start somewhere, right?  Try it here.  OR ELSE

So, I really like Twitter (find me here).  But it’s down a lot. So what is a Twitter fan like me supposed to do?  I went out and looked for different solutions to get my tweets (that’s a twitter post, for those not ‘in the know’) out, but there isn’t really that much out there.  Twiddict seemed ok, but it doesn’t let you see your tweets, just store them while twitter is down.  But I wanted a little more than that.  So I’m endeavoring to write up my own website using the Twitter API, along with some other things (plurk, your own blog, etc).  I’ve got a good start, and am hoping to have something testable within the next few weeks.  I’ll keep you posted

<out of tune>la la la <more in tune>La La La <in tune> LA LA LA LA LA!

That’s how I feel about my blogging right now.  It seems difficult to find your blogging voice.  “What should I blog about?” “Ok I’m bored with that, now what?”  Well, you keep pressing on towards the goal, as the apostle Paul would say.  To that end, I’m gonna start reviewing free stuff, open source stuff,  Wordpress stuff, free services I like, all sorts of goodies.  Will it be good? Maybe.  Will it be successful? Probably not.  But I like it right now at least ;)  To that end, my next blog post will be about some really cool freeware I’ve been using for about 3 years: Avast Antivirus.  Hope you like it and that it helps someone.

Yeah, it’s probably been reviewed a lot, but hey, it’s new to me

I discovered Twitter about 2 months ago, and at first, I was a little skeptical.  “Who would care about what I’m doing?” I remember saying to myself, then leaving the site immediately.  Then I saw a few more blog posts about it.  “How to Use Twitter For _______”.  “Top Ten Uses for Twtiter”.  On and on.  So I decided to give it a second chance.  A few of my favorite podcast novelists were on there (Scott Sigler, JC Hutchins, and a recent addition, Tee Morris).  So I click the “follow” button on, start watching the tweets, and two months later I’m hooked.  It’s just too much fun to microblog during your day about random observations, stuff going on, sites you like, etc.  Good times all around.

And now I find a blog tool that integrates all your stuff INTO TWITTER.  After wiping off the drool, I download, install, and here I am, writing a little review of it.

Installation was a breeze, as most Wordpress plugins are. I did notice a few snags, mostly in the “test login”, but this is probably more due to twitter than the plugin…  You see, twitter has this bad habit of crashing.  Daily.  Sometimes even hourly.  But no worries, the down time will actually give you time to get stuff done during your day.  Like going to work, watering your plants, playing with your kids, talking to your wife.  You know, stuff regular people do who aren’t addicted to twitter (just trust me, it’s fun).  And now, this will be my first post using Twitter Tools.  If it doesn’t work, i’ll come back to say that I hate it, but if it does (and I’ve seen it used before, so I’m pretty confident) lets just say it’s another hook that twitter has put into me.

Oh, and if you’re not on Twitter, go now.  Then follow me by clicking here.

Just got home from php|tek… I was surprised at the amount of RIA sessions this year, must be due to Zend partnering with Dojo… oh well, I’m getting into a lot of AJAX development (don’t develop apps w/o it!) so I was happy to sit in on the sessions.  Really good session on MySQL tuning as well which I enjoyed.  It would have been nice to have affordable meals within the hotel ($7.50 for oatmeal?) but everything else was nice.  Gotta say, I’m definately missing the boat doing all this PHP4 development.  Gotta get on the boat w/ PHP5.  PHP6 is gonna be out and i’m gonna be clueless.   Not that PHP5 is that big a leap, but gotta stay cutting edge, ya know?  something to look into.

I’ve got a few plugins I want to install, but it’s late and I’m tired, so tomorrow.  Gonna fall asleep to the lakers/spurs

Did I mention I’m a PHP programmer?  Maybe on my old site.  Anyhow, I’m sitting in the back room of the Day 2 Keynote, given buy the CEO of SugarCRM (this guy has a master’s degree in artificial intelligence.  i’m guessing he has a working bionic hand in a safe somewhere, along with a AI chip.  i should probably get ready for judgement day).  So far, I’m really enjoying it.  Attended a great session on mod_rewrite ( i <3 mod_rewrite) and a couple really good ajax/javascript sessions.  Good stuff all around.  Only a couple of snoozers, hehe… more to come

Let’s make some money, eh!?!? That’s what it’s all about anyhow, right?

So, you’ve got wordpress, you’ve got some plugins, now you want to sell some stuff. Fair enough. But what to do? Well, if you’re fairly hip, and have about half an hour to an hour to learn something, check out eShop. It’s a very clean shopping cart with a lot of features. You can add basically as many products as you like, to as many categories you like. This is done via creating pages and subpages (see my “Shop using eShop” link at the top) to display the categories and products you’ve created. Once you create a category page, you add a small piece of code to the page that eShop uses to display the products for that category (again, many options available). On the product page (and all other pages you write from now on, but not a huge deal) there is a new box available for you to type in your product information, sku codes, pricing, etc, and wha-la, you’re ready to sell.

Well, not that easy. You do need a PayPal account to sell with, so this probably isn’t a huge deal for most people. I don’t have a PayPal account (yet) so I didn’t test this part of it, so I’m assuming that works I also noticed that the category pages seem to conflict a little with the “ShareThis” plugin (just a little text overflow, but still a little conflict). But, all in all, a really nice, clean, simple shopping cart plugin that delivers all that it promises. Now buy up some widgets and see for yourself!