Tag Archives: Facebook

Recent Links: Social Networking

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Kelson

Some interesting links I’ve seen over the last few weeks.

On a related note, I’ve set up on Klout and PeerIndex, mainly out of curiosity. Their topic analysis needs a bit of work, though. Klout was convinced that my Speed Force accounts were influential about Washington, DC (rather than DC Comics) and, inexplicably, ducks. PeerIndex seems to think I post a lot about breakfast cereal.

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Links: Paper, Flickr, D&D Advice, LEGO Firefox, etc.

Posted on December 19, 2010 by Kelson

Some interesting links I’ve encountered over the past week or two.

And now some techie stuff:

Edit: Not a link, but I should mention: between a bug in Akismet and me not having time to go through it, I ended up with more than 2,000 comments in the spam folder just from the last 3 weeks. I don’t have time to look through that many items for false positives, so I just cleared it all out. If you left a legitimate comment that hasn’t shown up on the site, I apologize.

Posted in Computers/Internet, Food, General, Sci-Fi/Fantasy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

LOL_Spam: Now on Facebook & Buzz!

Posted on December 10, 2010 by Kelson

lol_spamFor the past year and a half I’ve been posting funny spam quotes at @LOL_Spam on Twitter. A couple of weeks ago, I finally set up a website as a central profile and hooked it into Facebook and Buzz.

So now you can follow daily humor pulled from real spam in three ways:

For now, the older quotes (before November 2010) are only on Twitter, but eventually I plan on importing them to LOLspam.net. I figure WordPress 3.1′s built-in support for asides would make it an ideal platform to create a searchable archive and still tie into the same networks.

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Protecting Firefox from Farmville

Posted on June 28, 2010 by Kelson

Firefox has been testing a new release that detects and closes crashed plugins (instead of letting them crash Firefox entirely) for several months, carefully making sure everything was working before they released Firefox 3.6.4 last week.

Within days, they released an update. I couldn’t imagine what they might have missed in all the beta testing. Katie wondered if the beta testers hadn’t been testing the limits.

You want to know what convinced Mozilla to issue an update so quickly?

Farmville.

Apparently Firefox was detecting Farmville as frozen and closing it. It turns out that on many computers, Farmville regularly freezes up the browser for longer than 10 seconds, and its players just deal with it and wait for it to come back. Mozilla decided that the simplest thing to do would be to increase the time limit.

What this tells me is that the type of person willing to beta-test a web browser these days is not likely to be playing Farmville — or if they are, it’s likely to be on a bleeding-edge computer that can handle it without 10-second freezes.

In more practical terms: Mozilla needs to convince a wider variety of users to help test their software!

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Links: Doomed Data, Web Services, WTF Textbook Questions & More

Posted on June 25, 2010 by Kelson

An experiment: I’ve modified* Twitter Tools to create digest posts as drafts instead of publishing immediately. That gives me a chance to edit a week’s worth of random thoughts and links down to the interesting stuff, clean things up a bit, expand things that could use more detail, and remind myself of items that I wanted to write more about later.

If it works out, and if the plugin still offers digests after it’s rewritten to use OAuth, I’ll probably use this same setup to make sure I keep on top of linkblogging at Speed Force.

*It was pretty simple. I just looked for the function that creates digests, then changed the post_status from publish to draft.

The Links

  • Why information storage is hard: The Universe Hates Your Data.
  • Interesting analogy: Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone aren’t quite ecosystems. Maybe it’s better to think of web services as governments. (via ma.tt)
  • WTF of the week: A book I was looking at on Amazon didn’t have any active discussions related to it, so Amazon showed me some random forum threads. They included this question on used textbooks: “Is it Ok if I used it to bludgeon several people to death with it?” Be sure to read the responses.
  • I love how Twitter’s status blog describes Wednesday morning’s outage as “high whales.”
  • Dear CNN: A 4.0 earthquake in California, especially one that didn’t cause any damage, is not breaking news. It’s more like business as usual. (It’s worth noting that a full day later, they haven’t updated the story with anything substantive…probably because there isn’t anything to add!)
  • Very cool: the Sci-Fi Airshow is a gallery of photorealistic images of spaceships from various science-fiction TV shows and movies set at, well, an air show. (via Bad Astronomy and SciFi Wire)

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Now on Networked Blogs

Posted on February 1, 2010 by Kelson

For those of you on Facebook, you can now follow K-Squared Ramblings on Networked Blogs.

In addition to letting you follow the blog through Facebook, it also lets me auto-publish new posts to my profile. I haven’t decided whether I want to enable that. It’s convenient, but I’m not sure I want every post to be imported. When I had the blog, Twitter and Facebook all linked together, I found myself occasionally making a post on one network and then deleting it from another because it was redundant, or didn’t really apply to the other audience, or there was a better way to cover the same thing in a different format. I also found myself trying to craft posts in one medium for another, rather than playing to their individual strengths. (Consider Facebook vs. Twitter link sharing.)

Follow K-Squared Ramblings on Networked Blogs!

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New Plugin: Twitter Tools Skip-FB

Posted on December 13, 2009 by Kelson

I’ve been using Alex King’s Twitter Tools for about a year now to both publish my WordPress posts on Twitter and build a daily (or, on another site, weekly) digest out of my tweets to post on my blog. I’ve recently started using Selective Tweets on Facebook to transfer my Twitter posts to Facebook.

The reason it’s called Selective Tweets is that it lets you choose which items to transfer, instead of just blindly dumping everything from Twitter to Facebook. You do this by adding the #fb hashtag to the end of each tweet that you want to also appear on Facebook.

On the downside: after the message is copied, that extra hashtag is just clutter. You can’t do anything about removing it from Twitter itself, but you can filter it out of your digests on your WordPress blog!

All you have to do is install and activate this plugin (after installing and activating Twitter Tools), and it will use the Twitter Tools API to filter out the #fb hashtag instead of linking it.

Download it: ktv-twitter-tools-skipfb-1.0.zip

I had intended to also filter it out of the sidebar, but the Twitter Tools API doesn’t seem to provide a way to do that.

If I ever do future versions, I’ll track them here: Twitter Tools Skip FB Plugin.

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Working on a Twitter Tools Filter for #fb Tags

Posted on November 13, 2009 by Kelson

Since the normal Twitter/Facebook link stopped working, I’ve switched to Selective Twitter Status. Instead of importing all your Twitter status updates to Facebook, it only pulls in the ones that end with the hashtag #fb. I’ve thrown together a plugin that hooks into Twitter Tools and filters out that tag when building a daily or weekly digest. (It was complicated by the fact that the README didn’t provide any real detail for the relevant API hook.) I tested the function outside of WordPress, then set it up to run on Thursday evening.

Good: It worked! Every instance of the #fb tag was removed, and everything else stayed.
Bad: Twitter Tools posted four copies of the digest.

Well, Twitter Tools does that sometimes. I’ll frequently see it post 2 or even 3 copies, and while I’ve determined it’s not related to WP Super-Cache, I haven’t gotten around to seriously debugging it. So I don’t know if it has anything to do with my plugin. Actually, it probably doesn’t, since it runs within the digest-building code.

For what it’s worth, Friday posted only two copies of the digest. I only found one item worth saving, though. (Well, two, but I expanded the other one into this post.)

I guess it still needs some testing. When I’m sure it’s working properly, I’ll post the code.

Update: Check out Version 1.0.

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To Do? Too Late! and Facebook Polls

Posted on November 12, 2009 by Kelson
  • I thought of several things to add to my to-do list on my way to work this morning. I just opened my list & can’t remember any of them. :-( #
  • Facebook polls need a “This is BS” option. Too many are based on false premises or are of the “Threat or Menace?” variety. :roll: #

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Status, Android C&D and Marketing

Posted on September 25, 2009 by Kelson
  • From @lol_spam:

    Spam subject: “Your decent watch will upgrade your status.” You mean I won’t need my phone to update Facebook? AWESOME! #

  • WTF? Google C&Ds Android modder Cyanogen. Isn’t it supposed to be licensed open-source in the first place? # The cease-and-desist order is about Google’s apps (Maps, Gmail, etc.) that are pre-installed, not about the operating system itself, but still, it feels like a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the license.
  • Odd: it took 3 hours for my shoulder to get sore after the flu shot. Still, NOTHING compared to last year’s tetanus shot. Now THAT hurt! #
  • This XKCD comic reminds me of the “uranium-free pizza” joke from some scouting event way back when. #

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