A little weekend geekery for Ye Faithful Reader and Persons Recently Returned from Abroad and Wondering What to Do with Their Blog…
Before the non-bloggers stop reading, these are mostly “micro-blogging” or social-networking related apps so consider it relevant if you Secretly Want to Have a Personal Blog, But Can’t Handle the Pressure of Living Up to the Awesomeness of Lunamania So Would Settle For Sharing Shorter, Less Intrusive Bits of Information. ok, I’ll stop with the trite caps. All applications are Free. I lied about the trite caps.
Twitter: Notice the “random updates†sidebar on the right hand column of Lunamania? For those in the know, those updates are “Tweets†–posts of 140 words or less. I can send them via cell phone or through twitter’s website. I’ve also set it up so my tweets appear as status updates on Facebook. Cuz sometimes you just have to let the world know what you ate for lunch. You can sign up and have a page to call your own and “follow†people to receive text messages of their Tweets. No other application will allow you to keep tabs on Darth Vader, Barack Obama and Stephen Colbert. There’s a bit of php script here that you drop into your template and it fetches the latest x number of tweets. This is also how the “tunes” section is run on this blog–more on that later.
Firefox/Foxytunes: The open source browser that brought us tabbed browsing also brings us the Foxytunes plug-in. This allows you to control iTunes from your browser. Yum. If that’s not Web 2.0 enough for you, with this add-on, you can selectively share what you’re listening to through Twitter. One click updates the djtoro channel. If you subscribe to that channel, you can get regular updates via text message of what I’m listening to. One word for you…stalker. You can check out how it works here. If you have a group of musical friends, it could be a neat way to share what you’re listening to.
Tumblr: Tumblr allows you to set up a mini blog where with one click, you can share articles, pictures, videos and anything else you’re checking out online. So this is the my page. This is a fun app for people who read a lot of stuff online and want to share, but don’t care to have a full blown blog. It’s also a convenient way to collect and share articles related to one topic. So you could set up an account to centralize and share all of your sites pertaining to marathons, stuff white people life or fishkeeping. I use it as a way to collect and share stuff for the “news” section on Lunamania. I add something to tumblr and it appears on Lunamania.
Goodreads: This is my favorite. It allows users to share books–yes, those things with paper pages. Sign-up and you can get updates about what your friends are reading, little reviews and add them to your bookshelf too. My list feeds into this blog.
Facebook: Yea, yea, I been known that before. You could do everything a blog does and also become a vampire that defeats the zombie-ninja army led by your kindergarten teacher (who of course you reconnected with on Facebook). I use the social bookmarking tags that appear under each entry on Lunamania to selectively cross post to my Facebook profile. It means comments are now kind of dispersed, but I’ll see what I can do about that.
Flickr:Since I have a photogallery on this site, I only use it to post pictures from my cellphone. That said, if you like to share pictures, it does everything you need. But if you don’t want to hand over your entire digital life to Yahoo/Flickr/Library of Congress, try Gallery 2. It’s open source and lovely.
Pixelpost: The albums section on this blog is run by Gallery2, but Photoweenie, my photoblog, relies on Pixelpost. This is also open source and easy to install. It caters to photobloggers rather than people maintaining album like sites. Which just means that templates and the interface are geared towards posting single pictures and not multiple albums. Easier to check out the end result than try to explain it.
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