T11M

Over the past month I have been trying to find a good use for social networking web apps like Twitter, Identi.ca, Facebook, et al. They have to have a purpose; there must be a good use for them. I think I have finally found a decent use for them, although ironically it requires one last social networking plugin – Lifestream. Lifestream basically aggregates all of the social networking updates that I make throughout the day and displays them in one plays in chronological order. In other words, if you visit my lifestream you can basically see everything I have found important enough to do that day in the social networking realm. I have posted my Lifestream here on my blog. My goal is thus to create one (yes, just one) simple place where anyone can go and find all of the content I have posted, shared, or otherwise interacted with during the day.  At the same time I am still participating in the social networking communities.  Another thumbs up to the open source community.

I finally gave in and installed Greasemonkey for Firefox. I didn’t like the thought of using Javascript written by someone else to modify web pages, but after playing with it for a few minutes the functionality is definitely apparent. My favorite script so far is “Google Reader Preview Enhanced” which enables the ability to view the web page the story comes from within Reader. So now I don’t have to open a tab every time I want to finish a story I just click the link and it opens a preview. The best part about Greasemonkey is how transparent and easy to disable it is. If you don’t want to have any of your Greasemonkey scripts run on a page simply click on the monkey head in the bottom corner of your screen. Rock on developers for Mozilla, rock on!

WordPress rocks!  I’ve been customizing my self hosted blog for the past couple of hours and just came across iPhone support.  I’ve enabled it and now am able to view and post to my blog from my iPhone – something I’ve been wanting for quite some time.  How cool is that?  I mean, I had the functionality through the BlogWriter Lite app, but that was with the lite version.  The full version is $4.99.  What a rip off!  It’s not like it was difficult to set up either.  All I had to do was enable XML-RPC support, install the WordPress App on my iPhone, configure the correct address and it works!  Piece of cake.

For that matter, the entire WordPress install is pretty simple.  If you have an idea of how web hosting works, it takes very little effort to get the blog set up and linked to the necessary database.  Check WordPress out, I guarantee it will impress you.

I’ve been working a lot lately with the Drupal CMS and I’ve been extaordinarily impressed by the built in functionality as well as the extensibility through modules.  Almost every web functionality you could possibly need is possible through the use of Drupal.  Not to mention the group of developers behind this project are outstanding, document well, and are Open Source.