Posts tagged It’s an Online Life

Online Life Tools: WordPress, Twitter (with Hahlo), Flickr

Replaces: Periodic personal communications

Recently there has been a significantly heightened interest in my life and the happenings therein from my friends and family. I would like to think this is because I’m so interesting, but I know it’s because my wife is pregnant. In the past, I would talk to certain friends and family members on a weekly or monthly basis and that was deemed plenty for staying up to date on my latest gripes about work, politics and the world in general. Now, however, people want to hear from me (us) much more often. So much so that at times (like after a doctor’s appointment) the next few hours is spent updating people on the phone. While this is nice, it isn’t always ideal, particularly when you have friend in, say, Kazakhstan.

Don’t get me wrong, I love talking to each and every one of these people. After all, they think highly enough of my family that they want to know exactly what is going on all the time. And while it is really nice to be loved, the fifth or sixth time you tell the same story you begin to forget details (or shorten the story because of exhaustion) which isn’t fair to whoever you’re talking to. Even worse is realizing a day or week later that you forgot to call or e-mail someone altogether! So while I still want to talk to all of these people as often as possible, sometimes putting things in a written format helps (especially when you have things like pictures you want them to see) get the story across or even just remind yourself of what the story is and should be.

In steps blogs, the ubiquitous internet communication device. Some herald them as the introduction of inaccurate journalism, some say they are serving to replace mainstream media outlets and even other people make fun of them as completely irrelevant. Whatever your opinion, you simply can’t deny their value as a way to keep up with friends and allow friends to keep up with you in an on-demand fashion.

So for this post, which is going to be long, I’ve broken things into the following subsets:

• WordPress – The ultimate blogging tool
• Twitter – The ultimate way to answer “What are you doing?”
• Twitter + Hahlo – The ultimate way to answer “What are you doing?” using your iPhone
• WordPress + Twitter – The ultimate way to answer “What are you doing?” via your blog
• Flickr – Photo sharing/blogging tool
• WordPress + Flickr – The way to add timely photos to your blog

WordPress

I use WordPress on my blogs (both personal and professional) as often as possible. The software is second to none in the blogging arena and while there may be software out there which provides an easier setup for first time bloggers anyone with a significant amount of blogging experience or complex blogging needs will end up using WordPress because of its flexibility and ease of use. Further, because WordPress is so standards compliant, it works great on an iPhone, even if doing more of the advanced tasks can be daunting.

WordPress comes ready for you to write articles of a published nature right out of the (digital) box. You can be up and running in very little time and have everything you need. So using WordPress alone covers most major announcements, but what about those smaller announcements that people seem to want from you. You know, the folks who call you and the first thing they say is “What are you doing?”

Twitter

For those folks we have a wonderful application available to us called Twitter. Now recently Twitter has gotten some grunts from techies who are over-using it. They update it for, quite literally, everything they do and those who follow them end up getting far too many updates to be useful. Instead, I like to think of it as a way to notify people who are near me that I’m doing something that they too may want to be involved in. For instance, “I’m going to lunch at the new place on Main Street at 11:30AM” may result in a friend messaging me back “I’ll meet you there!” Another great example is, “Boy, what a day at work, I’m headed home” may result in a message from a friend saying, “We’re hanging out at the pool hall, stop by on your way home.” So obviously the utility is nice, as long as it’s not overdone.

To get up and running with Twitter just head over to their site and sign up. Initially I had some confused moments over what things in Twitter-dom meant, so I’ll list my findings here:

• Following – This is the term used for a “subscription” to a friend’s feed
• Tweet – The term used to reference the small (140 characters or less) Twitter blog posts
• Delivery Options – You can have messages delivered to you in many ways, e-mail, messaging, text-messages, web-only… Make sure if you choose text messages that you only enable them for people you are following who don’t post 50 times a day

Twitter is great on its own, you can use text messaging to post to your feed and you can use text messages to get responses from your feed. You can also use e-mail or a Jabber compliant chat client (GoogleTalk) for all things Twitter. When you have an iPhone, however, you’re always looking for something slick to make your life easier. So while Twitter rocks, someone went and improved it specifically for the iPhone.

Twitter + Hahlo

Meet Hahlo, an easy to use, web-based, iPhone specific interface to Twitter. If you want to save your text messages for other things or just like the robustness of a web-based app for using Twitter Hahlo is the way to post messages and get replies.

Hahlo doesn’t maintain its own database of messages, instead it just provides a nice interface into Twitter’s API.  To get started with Hahlo is as easy as visiting their site and signing in using your Twitter account information. From there on, everything is pretty self explanatory and uses the same terminology as Twitter (see above).

WordPress + Twitter

So we’ve covered that Twitter is great and we’ve covered the best way to use Twitter via your iPhone. Now what about that blogging thing we were talking about?

As it turns out, WordPress and Twitter play extremely well together. Twitter provides your feed in an RSS format, so there are plenty of plugins for WordPress that allow you to sidebar up to the minute information via Twitter.

I use “Twitter Widget” by Sean Spalding for my needs and things seem to work great. There are instructions at the site as well as files for downloading.

So we’ve covered major events (using WordPress) and the answering of the ubiquitous question “What are you doing?” (using Twitter), what else could you possibly want to share using your iPhone and blog? How about pictures of what’s going on with you right now?

Flickr

Something that a lot of people have gotten into in recent years is photography. With the introduction and availability of digital cameras more and more people have been able to afford taking pictures of the things around them. This, of course, also applies to anyone with an iPhone.

One of the most engaging things about my personal blog, I’m told, is the fact that I keep updated pictures on there. To be honest, I started doing that as a way to share pictures with my wife. But the more and more I did it the more and more my friends have told me they love to see what pictures I’ll post every day.

In order to accommodate up to the minute photo sharing, you have to have a good place to store your pictures online. This is where Flickr excels.

If you go to the site and sign up you can immediately get started with uploading pictures you already have, which is nice and allows you to share your pictures with friends and get their comments. But for my purposes Flickr really shines when you start talking about its ability to consume images in nearly any way you can get them to the site.

Since this series of articles specifically talks about using the iPhone, I’ll outline how best to get your photo blog online and running.

1. Sign up for an account at Flickr
2. Set up your account to receive pictures via e-mail
3. Add your custom e-mail address to your iPhone contacts
4. Take pictures with your iPhone and e-mail them to Flickr

It seems simple because it is! The web interface for Flickr has a lot, and I do mean a lot, of functionality. It allows a lot of things that I don’t use and first time users can be confused by the many options. However, for the purposes of simply getting a picture online and sharing it with friends you can’t beat the simplicity of this approach.

WordPress + Flickr

Once again we have to ask the question “How does this work with my blog?” and just like with Twitter, the answer comes in the form of a WordPress plugin.

I’ve been using “flickRSS” by Dave Kellam. The plugin is simple enough to do what you want quickly and powerful enough to allow you to use CSS (zomg technical term!) to make things look however you want. So it should pretty well cover every experience level with WordPress, from new user to experienced blogger.

I almost always have a hard time writing a conclusion paragraph, particularly when the content is as diverse as this. So I’ll just end by saying that blogging has proven for me to be one of the most effective ways to stay in touch with family and friends. Oddly enough, I talk to my family and friends more than I did before on the phone, but now when we talk they already have the updates so instead of spending time rehashing stories I spend time talking to them about other things. It’s amazing what taking a little time to publish your stories can do for those who are interested in you.

Online Life Tool: Meebo

Replaces: Nothing, but provides on-the-go usage of almost any instant messenger application

Instant messaging is something that has become ubiquitous in everyone’s online life, not just mine. Everyone who spends any time at all online uses at least one instant messenger application. Because of this a lot of times the best way to get in touch with someone is to message them. In fact, many online services are beginning to embrace messaging as a way to interact with their APIs.

While the iPhone has a great SMS application (which I’ll reference plenty later) sometimes you need to message someone on a specific protocol (AIM, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, Jabber/Google Talk). In these cases Meebo does a great job of giving you web-based access and the ability to carry on a short conversation. I say short only because the client isn’t designed to always be on, so in general you have your conversation and sign off.

On my Windows Mobile device there were several applications I had purchased over the years in attempts to have an “always on” chat client. Everything from IRC to AIM was tried and I ended up disappointed with all of them.

For what it’s worth, Meebo is really, really good at what it does. But that doesn’t forgive the fact that there are still no really, really good built-in, “always on” messaging clients for those of us who are mobile and have an unlimited data plan which is always connecting anyway. Lucky for us iPhone users, word on the street is that there are hooks in the Apple SDK for the iPhone that will allow applications to continue running when not in focus. This should allow good messaging applications to be written, especially on the heels of a 3G release sometime in the near future. Beware, though, battery life will suffer.