New Workflow

On December 11th Twitterfeed stopped feeding my blog posts to Facebook, but the Twitter feed was still fine. The only answer that I could find was “its a free service, what do you expect?” 

Wow. Well, fair enough, it is a free service. I really like twitterfeed’s UI and the bit.ly integration, but being down for a week and a half just wasn't worth it to me, so I switched (back) to  friendfeed. I have had a friendfeed account for a couple of years and haven’t used it in awhile but I knew my password so no problems there.

I am SO happy that I went back to friendfeed, yes the twitterfeed UI is much slicker with its AJAX sliding divs and fading text, but friendfeed just works and I never have to worry about it. So now I have friendfeed setup as the nexus of my online metadata. Everything that I do online is gathered by friendfeed and then published on my friendfeed RSS feed, available here. I have further setup friendfeed to push those updates to my twitter feed as well as my facebook wall. In practice this means that if I share an RSS item, share a video on Qik, favorite a YouTube video, set my status on Google Talk, etc, it will automatically get distributed correctly.  This also means that I only need to set my status on a single service, and it will propagate to the other services automatically. The only thing that is lacking in my new workflow is bit.ly integration.

Bit.ly is a URL shortening service that also tracks clicks. For example with twitterfeed if I shared an RSS item I could tell how many people clicked through to the underlying article and where they got the link from. It was interesting to note how many clicks I got from twitter vs. facebook for example. Bit.ly doesn’t know who clicked, just that someone clicked. I may be able to integrate bit.ly into friendfeed, but I haven’t figured it out yet.

FriendFeed has other groovy social features as well, for example I can “follow” other users and get their updates as an RSS feed and even emailed to me either live or as a daily digest. It also has a nice commenting system to discuss shared items.

If you have a blog or are using Google reader to share RSS items, get yourself a friendfeed account so that I can keep up with you in a single location. :D

Little TeamPaulC

I just found this photo in my photo folder. This was taken 2 or 3 years ago at Richards house, those are Richard and Sarah’s cute chillens.

This photo just makes me giggle.

PaulC, where you been!?

Its been a couple weeks since the last blog post, been super busy! In no particular order…

My kindle 2 arrived last week!!! Man it is awesome. This will get its on blog post later today.

Been working with Bob and Sean on a new project, I am under an NDA so its secret squirrel stuff, but I can give you the high level.
Phase One: we fly to Africa, find Tarzan, and have him take us to the elephant graveyard.
Phase Two: secret squirrel stuff.
Phase Three: PROFIT!
So I have been pretty busy writing code, researching technology, and getting tickets to Africa.
Hopefully this project will be announced soon so that I can tell you guys all about it, and OF COURSE you will all participate. I mean, right?

TeamPaulC site mechanics...

SO,
here is how it works...

1. As of right now, you do not need to "follow" the TeamPaulC blog to comment, but you DO need to have a registered blogspot account. This means that you need to either have (or create) a Google account, OR AIM OR OpenId. You know that I am a google fan, so I would suggest that you get a Google account, AND USE IT. You can have Google POP your email from your other home/school/ISP accounts and have all your email in one place. But whatever you do, you need to have a blogspot account for comments.
2. It is possible that you will need to FOLLOW TeamPaulC ( see it over there in the left column?) to post comments in the future. SO, you may want to just "follow" now.
3. TeamPaulC discussions will work with ANY email address. This is basically an email list with a web front end. You should REALLY join it, BUT, use an email that you read so that you get the emails! Of course you can also read it online.

Again, in general I think that switching to Gmail (google) is a good idea. You can keep your old account, and have Gmail read the email for you so that people can keep using the old account. That is what I did with my Comcast account, now people can send to either Gmail OR comcast and I read them all in one place, Gmail. There are many valid reasons to switch to Gmail:

1. as stated previously, account consolidation, all your email in one place.
2. utility. Gmail is a good service and getting better. Google labs has updates periodically to add to the service, for example: integrated calendar, chat and RSS reader as well as labels.
3. 3rd party applications. There are no third party applications for Comcast, but there are MANY for Gmail including online/offline email readers for your cell phone.
4. integration into the Google family of service offerings, including picasa, blogspot, google groups, etc.
5. HTTPS. You can read Google over a secure connection by going to https://mail.google.com I think that there is also a setting somewhere to make the entire session secure.
   

So, there you have it.

Welcome back my friends

to the show that never ends,
we're so glad you could attend,
come inside, come inside.

SO, "why the complete overhaul of TeamPaulC?" you ask.

I was just SSSOOOO tired of always having to keep the hackers honest on the web server. :( It was taking up too much time. SO, I figured that I would switch to a completely hosted service, so here we are at blogspot (aka google).

Blogspot has a lot going for it, including integration with other services such as Google Reader, picasa, google groups, etc. If you want to post comments, you will need to login using you Google (gmail) credentials, or create a new account if you are not a google/blogspot user.

For now comments are pretty lax, if the spammers start hitting us, we will have to change to "only TeamPaulC members can comment", we will see. In case we have to do that, you may want to become a "follower" now by clicking the "follow" link in the left column, under "Followers".

Stay tuned for updates as they happen!