The Publications page on my blog is where I keep a list of all the articles I’ve had posted on other websites. I had my first article published on the 18th of September 2009, and here we are nearly reaching 2011, how time has flown!
In a way, writing for other sites, especially All About Symbian (my de facto writing residence) has become the norm, even to the detriment of this blog which I no longer have time to regularly update. On the other hand, I don’t want to forget how getting posts on other people’s websites was such a big deal to me in the beginning. So, I keep a list of every article I’ve had published. It’s a numbered list, so yes, I’m keeping score, and it’s currently at 127. If I guess at an average of 750 words per post, that means I’ve now written roughly 95,250 words since September 2009.
At the time of this writing, I’ve had 5 articles on CNET UK, 16 on Last100.com, and 106 shared between the sister sites of All About Symbian, All About MeeGo and Ovi Gaming.
To get the list numbering running in reverse so I can have the most recent posts at the top of the list meant I had to use a special Javascript, and due some glitch in the WordPress CMS, I have to hand-write the HTML code for these lists. However, the large volume of work I have with AAS (and associated sites), I’ve now written a spread sheet to log my articles and generate the HTML code for me to paste into the page editor here on my blog. Yes I’m being geeky, but it feels good to have a database of this stuff now.
So, that’s all, more of an update for myself than the rest of the world, but if you found this interesting, please feel free to visit my publications page and have a scroll through.
This is my tribute to one of the funniest items on the News Real podcast. So this is to say thanks to Sean and Cimm for pumping out quality content for 10 years.
If you use Twitter and Facebook, you may use the Twitter Facebook application for sending your Twitter updates to your Facebook status. Depending on how much you post to Twitter this might be somewhat noisy to your Facebook friends .
There’s a compromise! Search Facebook for an application called “Selective Twitter Status” and install it (make sure you remove the Twitter app straight afterwards though!). This application will scan your Twitter feed for updates, and only add tweets that include the hash-tag “#fb” to your Facebook feed. In practice, I’ve found this to be a little slower at updating Facebook than the official Twitter application, but this shouldn’t be a problem.
This is a video podcast that will appeal to those who fit the following. You are an extreme geek who is interested in following the tech news, and you have a tendency towards cynicism and grumpiness. Great, I’ve just traced out a stereotype, but watch an episode of this, you’ll see what I mean!
John C. Dvorak at the helm of Cranky Geeks.
This is a weekly podcast, about 30 minutes long. Every week it is hosted by the infamous John C. Dvorak along with “co-crank” Sebastian Rupley as a permanent panel member, in addition to two guest panel members every week.
If you are familiar with the “This Week in Tech” podcast, then you’ll like Cranky Geeks. In fact, I find Cranky Geeks a good substitute for TWiT simply because it packs in as much debate in half the time.
Also, Cranky Geeks is supplied in a range of formats, which I may as well give you the links to now:
If you’re one of those people who wonder what all those colourful little icons at the bottom of posts on blogs and news sites are for, then this blog post will hopefully be for you.
For a long time I struggled to make sense of the world of (what I vaguely termed) “social bookmarking”. There are big name sites you may have heard of, but there are even more. Although, in the view I’ve built you can seperate them into two broad sets.
I’ll start with what I call “social news”. These are sites which are best used for time relevant posts, such as posts from news sites. The sites I term as “social news” don’t tend to be so good for reference material. The strength of social news sites is to “vote up” posts, stories, etc, that are popular today or this week. They’re a constant popularity contest, and nothing stays at the top for long. As such, you don’t get anything posted that, while interesting or useful, isn’t of the moment. So to speak.
What I call “social bookmarking” sites get a much wider spectrum of sites being submitted. Rather than “voting up”, the idea of social bookmarking is for people to add whatever they find interesting.
It has been my experience that if you are looking for something specific, perhaps a tech review, the social bookmarking sites are fare more likely to find you something useful. It is unlikely that someone would go to a social news site with, say, a mobile phone review, it isn’t news, as such.
Examples of social news sites are Digg, Yahoo Buzz and Reddit. All of these sites work in the same basic way. Someone submits a site, and if other people find it interesting they vote up the story. The more votes a story has got, the more likely it is to be shown on the site’s front page.
Examples of social bookmarking sites are Stumble Upon and Delicious. Delicious is a simple concept, you submit a bookmark along with a description and “tags” (i.e. keywords). Delicious has been running for so long that there is a wealth of submitted links and searching often yields good results. Stumble Upon does the same but takes things a step further. Stumble Upon operates via a browser toolbar. On sites you visit, you can click on buttons on the toolbar to say whether you like the site or not. After Stumble Upon learn’s your preferences you can ask it to take you to recommended sites. So, not only can you search Stumble Upon, but you can let it show you things you may find interesting.
If you found this interesting and want to know more, here are some other blog posts:
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