On 27 April 2008 I started Twittering. This isn’t a post about what it’s about or how to use it, but an observation about Twitter and how it’s kind of like blogging for me.

Twitter only allows you to post up to 140 characters which isn’t that much. It is, however, a great exercise in being succinct and for that alone it’s worth it. Because you can only post a small amount, it’s also very quick which obviously satisfies a lot of people because a lot of people are doing it.

For those of you who only read me via a feed reader I’ve taken the liberty of posting my tweets (nearly all of them). It gives some insight into the (minutae - I knew I’d spelt this wrong) minutiae of my life that I don’t write about in my blog. I do have my latest tweets in my sidebar.

If you twitter and would like to follow me, please feel free. I might even follow you back. Like some other social networks I’m not a slave to it as my fairly infrequent posting attests to, but I do get over every now and again and see what people are up to and to add something myself.

One tweet I would have added but by the time I got home all I wanted was a drink, was ‘It took one hour to get home last night because a lane was blocked off on South Road. Grrr’. (It normally takes 20 minutes max!).

Here goes:

_____________________

Home from work, delousing of child’s hair now done. 11:38 AM August 11, 2008 from web

Can’t help myself. Am watching the opening ceremony of the olympics. It is a feast. 09:32 PM August 08, 2008 from web

Unfortunately those dishes will not wash themselves. 01:56 PM August 08, 2008 from web

A new season of Heroes is about to start. I’m SOO excited! 09:22 PM August 06, 2008 from web

Teacher’s are on strike this morning, so I’m not at work. 08:27 AM August 06, 2008 from web

So, tax still not done, and I have one day a bit to prepare for a job interview! Any tips? 08:03 PM August 04, 2008 from web

Today - need to blog, do tax, clean the dirty floors, clean up paperwork, go shopping. Aaarrrgggghhh! 10:27 AM August 01, 2008 from web

I spoke to soon about my hours of sleep. I awoke, and got up, at 5.30am today. 06:26 AM July 31, 2008 from web

@shaicoggins I’m really busy at work, therefore not much time for other online activities. Things will get back to normal soon I hope. 02:00 PM July 30, 2008 from web in reply to shaicoggins

What is it about rain, that makes everyone want to catch the bus at the same time, making them full and therefore making me miss out! 10:15 AM July 30, 2008 from web

@shaicoggins Usually to bed around 10.30, up at 6.30 during the week. Those hours change on non-work days. 10:13 AM July 30, 2008 from web in reply to shaicoggins

He’s onto the fact that I use the ‘let’s have a race’ trick to make him do things quicker! 08:17 PM July 29, 2008 from web

Someone’s hacked one of my blogs damnit! 07:09 PM July 25, 2008 from web

Writing for my blog is SO much more interesting than writing a job application. Write the application I must! 06:37 PM July 24, 2008 from web

Ah, it’s good to be home and eat proper home cooked food. Just made soup and roast chicken is on the menu tonight. 02:03 PM July 20, 2008 from web

Am in Perth and am hoping the rain will hold off for a bit today. Bringing only non waterproof shoes for the boy was a mistake. 10:45 AM July 16, 2008 from web

Was gonna write a blog post but my server’s down. Am all packed to head to Perth tomorrow morn. About to watch Amazing Race, then bed. 09:19 PM July 10, 2008 from web

@Miscmum Congratulations. That is huge and I’m sure you’ll be great. Wish I could be there. 04:44 PM July 09, 2008 from web in reply to Miscmum

Am addicted to Playstation at the moment. Blogging is taking a back seat. 10:57 AM July 01, 2008 from web

Am going to a ladies lunch soon - a childfree one. To say I’m looking forward to it is an understatement. 10:28 AM June 29, 2008 from web

This time seven years ago I was trying to push a 91b 6oz human out of my body. 09:14 AM June 26, 2008 from web

My son is writing a book about a fish and a mean octopus. 08:47 PM June 24, 2008 from web

Cake baking, pasta bake making - it’s a cooking fest here. 01:59 PM June 20, 2008 from web

Sore eyes - damn computer! 03:18 PM June 19, 2008 from web

Someone wash my dishes for me please! 08:51 PM June 18, 2008 from web

Got to clean windows, cut the boy’s hair today - and just relax. Off to bed now. 10:57 PM June 17, 2008 from web

Day at home today because of the teacher’s strike. 10:49 AM June 17, 2008 from web

Overheard on bus: ‘Apparently they’ll give you $10,000 to cut your little toe off and sew it back on.’ 09:21 PM June 12, 2008 from web

My fire is all ready to light when I get home from work tonight. Think we’ll need it - it’s chilly! 08:53 AM June 12, 2008 from web

Have booked my Perth accommodation. Thank goodness for the internet! 06:32 PM June 09, 2008 from web

Sex and the City was fun and pretty much what I expected it to be. It’ll be Prince Caspian next Friday. 06:12 PM June 06, 2008 from web

It’s time to wear the beanie when walking the dog in the morning. Frosty! 09:00 AM May 27, 2008 from web

It’s nearly half past 10 and I’m going to get into my pyjamas. Sweet dreams to me. 10:24 PM May 26, 2008 from web

It’s nearly 10am and I’m still in my pyjamas. 09:55 AM May 25, 2008 from web

Am getting a ridiculous amount of comment spam lately. Anyone else? 01:06 PM May 24, 2008 from web

Just walked for one hour return to take my boots to get fixed and the cobbler’s was shut! 02:38 PM May 23, 2008 from web

@shaicoggins Yes, twas a bad day indeed and my fault to boot. Today will be a lot better. Talk about learning from mistakes! 08:17 AM May 23, 2008 from web in reply to shaicoggins

Am glad today at work is OVER. 06:59 PM May 22, 2008 from web

The lad and I didn’t lock horns today. Things are looking up! 10:01 PM May 21, 2008 from web

Get back to work me. 11:56 AM May 21, 2008 from web

The moon just before it went to bed this morning was absolutely marvellous. 10:33 AM May 20, 2008 from web

All I want is a peaceful Saturday afternoon without phone or door salespeople demanding things of me! 04:06 PM May 17, 2008 from web

I lit the fire last night and I’ve still got it going this morning. 08:55 AM May 17, 2008 from web

He’s in a right silly mood this evening. 06:36 PM May 16, 2008 from web

About to be off to circus school with junior. 03:33 PM May 16, 2008 from web

@rckstrscott So sorry to hear about your mum. 08:21 AM May 16, 2008 from web in reply to rckstrscott

Is a dream about quicksand ominous or not? I’m still remembering it tonight. 07:44 PM May 15, 2008 from web

@ninjapoodles And I thought you just loved me. You started following me yesterday. 07:43 PM May 15, 2008 from web in reply to ninjapoodles

The lad cried himself to sleep because a song he was listening to made him sad. Poor love. 08:38 PM May 14, 2008 from web

@shaicoggins So sorry you didn’t make it in time Shai. My thoughts are with you. 09:03 AM May 14, 2008 from web in reply to shaicoggins

Ukulele done and dusted for the night. Watching a bit of tv then night night for me. 09:30 PM May 13, 2008 from web

Am shortly going to see Sex and the City. 09:47 AM June 06, 2008 from web

I am still around - just haven’t blogged for the last few days. 08:53 AM June 05, 2008 from web

Tired today. My aunt kept me up singing to old songs last night! 09:06 AM June 04, 2008 from web

Thought there was a conspiracy happening in Perth when trying to ring businesses today and nobody answered, but no just a public holiday. 06:17 PM June 02, 2008 from web

I think I’ve cleaned my computer of spyware. I think…. 05:31 PM May 31, 2008 from web

My computer is has been infected. Have borrowed my sister’s laptop to research problem. 10:26 AM May 30, 2008 from web

I really think Telstra could design their bills SO much better. I find them hard to understand. 08:41 PM May 28, 2008 from web

Today was really busy and the cold beer when I got home was very welcome indeed. 06:35 PM May 28, 2008 from web

A nasty virus has been hanging around here all weekend. This time it’s on my computer and not in my system (touch wood).

I couldn’t even logon to my computer. I had a mild panic when I realised that my backing up strategy is nowhere near good enough. I thought through all the things (mainly photos) that I would lose if I had to reformat.

Luckily I think I’ve avoided that and have a working computer again.

I don’t know that all the spyware/adware/trojans or whatever you want to call them have left my computer but I’m well on the way.

I borrowed my sister’s laptop to do some research which was really handy as my IT support days are long gone. I found a helpful website - the Spyware forum and have followed their recommendations. I’d always assumed that with my virus and firewall protection I would be covered but obviously not.

I’ve also bought an external hard drive which now contains a backup of all my data. I breathed a sigh of relief when I finished the transfer to it.

There’s also been lots of spam comments coming through here so I’ve installed the Extended Comments Options plugin so that after 30 days nobody can comment. I’d had something like 700 comments on one particular post which skewed my popular post stats. I’ll shortly go in and see what I can do there.

Hopefully normal programming will shortly resume here.

Like Plain Jane Mom and others have lamented, it’s hard to know whether to reply to commenters via email, ie privately, or to respond to them via your blog in the comments, ie publicly. The trouble with the former is that the conversation is lost on your blog and the trouble with the latter is that the person you’re responding to via another comment might not check back to read it. Of course, you could do both (which I have occasionally done) but this is clunky and a bit time consuming.

But there is a way which I have just implemented here. A Wordpress plugin called Comment email responder. This means:

The response becomes a comment in the normal way, but also fires off an email to the commentor with the content of the response and his original comment.

I haven’t tested it yet because I’ve had no comments since I added the plugin so I’ll give it a go and see what I think. I’d like to know what you think too.

I run Google Adsense on my other blog - that safarisuit.com one to try and cover the cost of hosting. There’s been some changes with Adsense lately, one of them being that I have to tie that account to a Google account. Fair enough I thought, I’ve got a Google account, I’ll match them up. Except I can’t.

The message I received when trying to combine was not very helpful, ie “A user with the email you specified already exists
Please select a different Google Account login to access this account.”

After a bit of digging I found out that my existing Google account had been banned from running Adsense. I vaguely remember running Adsense on this blog briefly and I took it off. I’m a good girl though and never clicked on my own ads - a no-no in Google’s eyes. This is part of the email they sent me with the news:

Thank you for providing us with additional information. However, after thoroughly reviewing your account data and taking your feedback into consideration, we have re-confirmed that your account poses a significant risk to our advertisers. For this reason, we are unable to reinstate your account. Thank you for your understanding.

Actually I do not understand. What’s a significant risk? I run a personal blog. How’s this a risk? Surely some more information would not go astray, but Google wiggle out of this by saying they cannot let publishers know any information because of their proprietary system.

I’m not alone on this. The exact same thing happened to Ronni Bennett of Time Goes By recently and I’m sure we’re not alone.

Methinks it’s time to look around for advertisers who do not have such ambiguous emails and actually want to help their customers.

I think I’ve said on this blog before that Facebook is a virus and I only really use it to play Scrabulous. Today I logged into Facebook to clear some of my requests and thought I’d do the ‘their, there, they’re’ test but it won’t let me unlock the results until I spam all my friends with it too. Sod that. I know I got 100%.

And it seems that any application I may choose to install wants me to spam all my friends also. I can’t add a Lil Green Patch request without first sending more off to my friends. I’ll do that in my own time thanks, or not because I don’t like being TOLD what to do.

And those Funwall messages aren’t just for me, they’re for everyone they were sent to. Surely there’s an application that’s user friendly that doesn’t expect me to spam all my friends? Even my Flickr Gallery was giving me grief and not letting me update.

Come on you Facebook application writers - do something not so spammy. Think of the users! If it’s good it will spread anyway.

Not to be content just looking at stats for my blog and my RSS feed subscribers, I can now look at stats for my Flickr photos. This was a new feature announced a few days ago on the Flickr blog.

I would have thought it would be announced on my Flickr homepage but I didn’t see it. Mind you it might have been there but I just missed it. The Flickr stats show me a daily graph with photo views then the stats get broken down to referrers, most viewed photos. I’ve often wondered where my photo viewers come from. Now I know. See help on how to get to your Flickr stats. Note this is only for Pro members at the moment.

Karen at Misc Mum has asked for some Wordpress help and feedback. I thought rather than just reply in her comments, I’d do a post incase others might find this type of information useful.

Some people have mentioned that they find the font too small. Indeed, I’ve had this thought too. Is there somewhere in the template pages that this can be modified painlessly and with little chance of me buggering everything up and leaving a Misc Mum hole in the websphere the size of Chernobyl?

Yes, this is really easy to do by editing the style.css file but before fiddling around with this back it up just in case.

In your Wordpress admin, select Presentation, then Theme Editor as shown in the diagram below. (click to view larger image) The style.css file is the one that opens by default and this is the one that you have to edit to change the look of your website/blog. Look for the style about ‘body’. You might have to scroll down a bit but you will know when you see something under ‘body’ that has a font-size element included. The ‘body’ information in the diagram below is actually copied from Misc Mum’s site so if she changes .9em to 1em to start experimenting with her font size it should change the font size across the whole website.

I haven’t got admin access to Misc Mum’s website files, but anyone can see anyone else’s stylesheet information if they know how to look as it’s clearly defined within the <head> </head> tags of websites.

Important to note is that this can affect all the other font size styles across the website like headings, which she might not want to do. However, upon looking at Misc Mum’s stylesheet she has a ‘content’ div which as far as I can figure out defines how the content in her blog is displayed. The current content div looks like this (it’s also in the above style.css file):

#content {

  float: left;
  width: 480px;
  display: inline;
  text-align: left;
  border-right: 1px dotted #4c7578;
  margin-top: 10px;
  padding-left: 10px;
  padding-right: 10px;
  margin-bottom: 10px;
  padding-bottom: 10px;
  font-size: .8em;}

If she leaves the body font-size alone, and just changes the font-size in the content div above from .8em to .9em or 1em, then it should just change the information within the content section of her blog and leave most, or all, other font sizes alone.

When I’m editing my style.css file, which is what I did to considerably change my blog’s theme, I usually change one thing, save it, view the blog and see what else it has affected. I’m a big experimenter and as I said at the beginning, if you completely stuff up, then you’ve got your backup all ready to copy over the stuff-up so you’re back to square one.

Back to Karen’s feedback request, she says,

Adam thinks my sidebars are too cluttered. I went “Huh?” I thought they were okay.” What do you think?

Personally I’m in for a fairly clean look and this site does take a little too long to load for me at home with my not so fast broadband connection because of what has to load. I think it’s good that the content is on the left column because at least people can read this while the rest of the site loads.

Therefore I would suggest moving the ‘Proudly supporting’ graphics to a new page, perhaps the About me page? Also as bloggers get various awards, these can clutter up the sidebar too. I’d suggest as the awards are over, move them into their own page too. Personally if I want to find out more about a blogger I’ll go and read these pages to see what they’ve achieved and so on.

I note that there’s a blogroll on the main pages and Blogroll also has it’s own separate page. From a usability perspective this is immediately confusing because it’s not obvious if they’re the same or different, so I’d consolidate the Blogroll. Similarly is it necessary to have Quick archives in the sidebar when there’s an Archives link at the top? I’d also move the Site info to the footer.

Lastly, Karen asks about some plugins she’s using. I don’t use any of them so can’t comment, but if I can’t get a plugin to work I just leave it and find something else or just don’t bother. Keep in mind that some plugins are flaky and they can also add to the time it takes for a site to load so tread carefully with them.

I hope this information is useful and if anyone has any questions about it please let me know.