dae's weblog

Ha! Nothing beats writing an article on a fire I started myself

As I was browsing through the latest Bright Magazine 28 (July 2009), I noticed their colophon mentioned names of employees (Medewerkers Uitgelicht), email addresses, several web sites, phone numbers, inter-corporate relationships, yes, even a fax number fax number, but no Twitter account! It puzzled me. It’s 2009.

So I did some research. I’ve known for a long time that Bright’s name on Twitter is @BrightSite, which surprised me earlier (the name BrightSite refers to a web site, while an innovative organisation such as Bright obviously has the potential of conquering more media than just the web), and I concluded that the obvious first choice, @Bright, must have already been taken. I investigated this matter and it checks out. @Bright is owned by somebody who opened the account on Twitter, wrote his initial opening tweet on March 7th 2007 and took a sabbatical. He’s probably enjoying a nice cocktail on a small island with a name I can’t pronounce. But nothing has happened with (t)his @Bright account ever since and that’s a pity…

Curious, stubborn and helpful as I am, I couldn’t resist sending Bright a tweet on this matter. The nice thing about Social Networking is that it allows you to link just about anything to everything (TV, print, web whatever the future may have in store for us), so I wanted to know what’s up with Bright and Twitter. Maybe Bright’s presence on Twitter was still “experimental”, which is the case in many organisations . Experimental is a kind of fuzzy status, which is somewhere in between “not present on Twitter” and “present on Twitter with full confidence”. Sometimes there is a Twitter account, but without tweets, which makes you wonder if the company you had in mind is actually the company whose Twitter account you’re viewing. A good example is @WallMart.

My preferable way of informaing Bright was doing it quiet and sneaky, comme it faut, but Twitter only allows you to send a Direct Message (private message) to someone who’s following you (who is a follower of yours) and Bright and I don’t have that kind of relationship. I didn’t see any other way than to send my tweet into the Twitterverse (the wide world) and to sit and wait. I could have traditionally done this by email, but I was afraid of ending up in somebody’s drawer, waiting for monday to happen and besides: we’re talking Twitter here, so I thought: “If they take Twitter seriously, they just can’t but notice my tweet”. I did my homework and discovered that Twitter accounts @BrightTV, @BrightMag and @BrightMagazine were still unused. But for how long? I decided to write a consecutive tweet (sorry, I did this in dutch).

Right. There are organisations sáying the’re interested in innovation, but in reality they don’t seem to *really* care. I was pleasantly surprised that Bright had responded to me, even before I could say Twitterverse! The Twitter accounts @BrightTV (beautiful, even if I say so myself!) and @BrightMagazine are now taken. Nicely dressed with cool logos and, of course, Protected, meaning that the owner has to approve you following him first. I suspect low tweet activity, but the account names have been claimed. By Protecting your Twitter account nobody else can use the names and Bright doesn’t have to do anything with them yet. Showing your empty tweetless account to the Twitterverse isn’t that appealing

Haha. I can imagine what happened. Someone sees something on Twitter and starts calling/mailing/texting/faxing somebody else. The whole Emergency Contact Protocol 2009 unfolds itself and eventually reaches the The Big Boss himself. Somebody is woken up during the weekend: “Is that Farmer’s Son from Schagen right about this? It has to be taken care of NOW and it should have been already. What are we paying you for, anyway?!?”

Which brings me to the following: Should there be a law on squatting for empty Twitter accounts? Due to the ongoing lack of housing in The Netherlands we have a law (as long as we have politicians who care) that describes exactly under which circumstances a building may be taken, if it’s empty and its owner abandons it. How long do you think a Twitter account may be inactive, without actually being used? Will we see Twitter account hijackers, claiming your name, so you have to buy it back from them in exchange for a lot of money, like we saw (and see) with domain names? Should Twitter seize its Protected accounts, so we can see what’s going on?

#ThumbsUp Bright! You’re doing the right thing and next year I’ll ask my company to buy me another subscription on your fantastic magazine for my birthday

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FeedBurner is a service, offered by Google, allowing you to “burn” RSS feeds. But what is an RSS feed and what is FeedBurner’s added value to it? Tip: Print out this crash course, so you can easily reproduce the steps without switching between browsers.

First: RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It allows you to “harvest” headlines from web pages. But FeedBurner does a little bit more… Of course you can harvest headlines from other people’s web sites, but if you have your own web site (with RSS support) you can share its content and much more! Go to your site and check the presence of the orange icon:

Good. If you see the orange icon, it means your site supports RSS. If it doesn’t, there are several ways of getting it depending on the system you’re using, but I won’t cover that now. Let’s go on: Click on the icon. You should see the following:

Write down the address from the address bar or copy it by clicking the address bar and press Ctrl-C. Next, go to http://feedburner.com

You need a Google account. Sign in or sign up, if you don’t have any yet. Once you’re signed in, Choose “Burn a feed right this instant” and type (or paste by using Ctrl-V) the address of your RSS feed:

Press Next. Enter a title for your feed and click Next again:

Your feed has been created! Write down the address of your FeedBurner feed (or copy it by using Ctrl-C) and click Next:

Check every option and click Next:

Now, go to Publicize:

Click Awareness API:

Activating the Awareness API allows other services to exchange information with FeedBurner. Click to Activate:

Next, click Email Subscriptions:

And Activate:

FeedBurner reports the service is now active:

Type or paste the address of your FeedBurner feed into the address bar. It shows you the ability to subscribe by Email:

If somebody wants to subscribe to your updates by email, they need to enter their email address:

The Analyze screen shows you the number of subscribers to your feed:

It also shows which systems your subscribers are using:

And of course it shows the origin of your subscribers. Hey, we’re talking Google here!

Conclusion: You’ll understand that FeedBurner can give you a lot of insight on who’s reading your posts. FeedBurner offers them different ways of receiving updates and even if they want to receive updates by email, FeedBurner automatically takes care of it all, so you don’t have to send out thousands of emails after updating your web site. If people choose to unsubscribe from your email updates, FeedBurner handles everything and you don’t need to do anything! It goes without saying, that the result of subscriptions by email appear in the statistics nicely.

Have fun keeping your web site up to date and I hope my crash course has been able to contribute to it!

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Right. I just got home after a day out. First I went to the NGN in Bunnik and then I went to Utrecht for an evaluation of the Dutch Joomla!Days 2009. It was great, as usual, guys! I’m surprised every time I realize how cool it is to catch up with people who share the same interests. And @EstherTwitts: we have a lot of coffee to drink together and @GXJansen: your feed is on its way!

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I’ve been using WP to Twitter for a while to have my weblog posts tweeted to Twitter automatically. Today I started experimenting with feedburner.com. FeedBurner has been taken over by the allmighty Google, which means we can get lots and lots of statistics…

Here’s the deal: I took the RSS feed of my weblog and fed it to feedburner.com. Next, I went to twitterfeed.com, linking the RSS feed from feedburner.com to my Twitter account (are you still with me?).

The result is that all posts I write on my weblog end up in the RSS feed, after which they’ll be picked up by feedburner.com, passing them on to twitterfeed.com, after which they finally end up being tweeted on Twitter. This may look like a long, long way, but for me it means I can run my weblog with one plugin less… Furthermore, WP to Twitter only lets you shorten your URL’s with cli.gs, which is a bit buggy and has some apparently unsolvable issues. twitterfeed.com has a broad variety of URL shortening services like bit.ly, which offers great statistics about the clicks to your links.

And this is a nice syndication experiment, of course! RSS syndication lets you link just about anything to everything and that’s a nice challenge!

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Right. How am I going to explain this?

When I woke up this morning, I found something on Twitter about a new system called TweetBoard. I heard something about Alpha invites, allowing me to test their new service free of charge. Alpha is a geek word for experimental software. First, there’s only an idea. Then comes the Alpha release, Beta release, then the Release Candidate (RC) and finally the Ready to Manufacture (RTM). TweetBoard is still Alpha software… Good to know!

It took a while before it got to me. TweetBoard can best be described as a bridge between Twitter and your blog. I sent an Alpha request by using a specially formulated tweet:

Requesting an invite for Tweetboard Alpha (http://tweetboard.com) by @140ware, for my site: http://www.daepunt.com

If you want to have a go at this for your own blog, copy the request tweet e x a c t l y, but don’t forget to replace the URL of my weblog with yours. About a minute or so later I received the following message:

@daepunt, your Tweetboard Alpha invite request has been approved. Find installation instructions here: http://bit.ly/1JtNr

I followed the instructions. My weblog runs on WordPress and the instructions said that I should make a Text Widget and copy/past a piece of JavaScript in it. I did that and it worked, but it left me with an ugly and empty Text Widget, so I pasted the code in the footer.php instead and now it looks nice and clean. If you check out the left side of my blog, you’ll notice a coloured tab and if you press it…

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As I mentioned earlier, the posts on my weblog automatically get tweeted to Twitter, as well as Facebook, Plaxo and Hyves. I felt sorry for my LinkedIn account. I’m not keeping it up to date with status updates, because I refuse to enter the same information in all those networks manually if those clever computers can’t do it for me. And that hanged today as Guido Jansen shows us in a presentation how to connect your twitter timeline to LinkedIn status updates. The system responsible for this is ping.fm and while I was there anyway, I decided to take care of MySpace as well

Meaning: the posts on my weblog are automagically reposted to:

1. Twitter
2. Facebook
3. Plaxo
4. Hyves
5. LinkedIn and
6. MySpace

Right! That saves a lot of time and this way everybody gets to read the stuff they’re interested in on the network of their choice. The only thing left on my wishlist is Hyves. Hyves doesn’t like Twitter’s #hashtags, which currently results in hashtagged tweets not being posted to Hyves. Ping.fm is able to remove hashtags (as it does with LinkedIn), but it has no support for Hyves yet (or the other way around).

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There are lots of websites (including dae’s weblog) that allow you to log in using your Facebook account. It’s strange you get a pop up window that hardly shows you the URL, which means you don’t know if you’re really submitting your credentials to Facebook, unless you check it first. And since the Facebook window doesn’t use an SSL-certificate, your name and password are sent over the network in plain text anyway. Wouldn’t it be better if this window featured an SSL certificate and a bigger URL bar, that shows exactly where your name and password are going?

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Hi there,

Let me tell you a little bit about myself. My name is Dae Punt and I came to the Dutch Joomla!Days 2009 (I’ll refer to it as #jd09nl from now) to do live reporting. My friend and collegue Marc Nederbergh took care of recording and editing video and I did text coverage of the event. I work for two companies: My own company Punt & Partners automatisering B.V. is a System Integrator for Small and Medium sized compnies (1-100 seats). We fill the gap between customers who want to buy solutions and manufacturers of products, who merely want to sell their products. They obviously don’t speak the same language and that’s where we come in. We build, implement and maintain networks, small or big, internet or site-to-site connectivity, solutions for remote access, BlackBerry BES, but we also guide our customers through growing and shrinking their IT infrastructure in times of prosperity or crisis. I also work for Marc’s company, which is called CleverInsert B.V., a company that builds intelligent web solutions with the same philosophy. CI’s Content Division is called CleverContent and that was the T-shirt you could have seen me wear if you were there, at #jd09nl.

We use, support and share a lot of Open Source Software in both companies and that’s how we ended up at #jd09nl as volunteers, doing what we did. I’m writing this article to share my ideas about the event and I hope other people (organisers or visitors of Joomla!Days events or any other event) may benefit from our experience.

Before this event started, there was a website called www.joomladays.nl

It’s strange, but it’s 2009 and some people still have to be convinced of the need to have a website for their events. I hope you’ll conclude with me that, after reading this article, we wouldn’t have been able to do what we did without without one. And we’re talking Joomla!Days here, so need I say more?

About the site

From day 1 the site was multilingual. I have a very straight idea about multilingual websites: Register several domain names and make sure the Top Level Domain Name (TLD) matches the country you’re organising the event in. In my opinion the main domain name of the #jd09nl website should have been joomladagen.nl, which exists, but wasn’t used as such.

joomladagen, because that’s what we call it in The Netherlands and .nl because that’s the country hosting the event.

International events attract international speakers and visitors. Supporting more that your native language is very important and that’s why I would have registered a joomladays.nl as well, redirecting (in either a visible or invisible way) to joomladagen.nl, but “telling” the site to display English language. If you’re using Joomla! you may find Nooku very helpful.

The website featured a hashtag Twitter-feed, showing all tweets from Twitter, containing the #jd09nl hashtag. I thought it was very brave to do this without any moderation, but I wasn’t surprised that nobody abused this cool technological feature. Depending on the event you’re organising and the type of visitors, this may or may not be a good idea. It is Twitter and everybody can say what they want, so think well before you let anybody’s opinion show up on your front page…

Because of Twitter and the hashtag feed it was very easy for anybody to inform others of the event, share ideas, and “meet” new people, even before the event had actually started! That by itself was a great surprise to me.

When I arrived at the event, the organisers had built a live website called live.joomladays.nl, showing the Twitter feed on the right of the screen and a live Flickr photo feed on the left of the big projected screen. All pictures (no video, unfortunately, although Flickr supports it) with #jd09nl in the title showed up automatically. Funny thing is that, during the event and its presentations and tracks, there was a lot of interaction between the people present, without the need of talking and interrupting the speaker! Twitter was not (yet) used for interaction between the speaker and the audience. It was just a “background” thing and I was surprised how everybody (myself included) seemlessly contributed without asking anybody for instructions or rules. Guess that must have been the geek-factor  Flickr featured an Open jd09nl Group that allowed people to group their pictures, taken and stored individually. Don’t forget to explain people about photo geotagging. Of course, your website is a good place for this kind of background information, which is off topic; in the end it’s just extra information and not what the event is all about.

Saying this, I realize that at the same time a lot of people who had never used Twitter before, became curious and opened a Twitter account to see what the hashtag business was all about. I think if the joomladays.nl website would have had a bit more information about Twitter in general and its potential meaning to the event, more people could contributed to the event more actively.

It’s June 2009 and a phenomenon called Twitocalypse has caused a lot of problems. In a few words: Twitocalypse is a kind of millennium problem for Twitter. Every tweet has a number and Twitted has crossed the magical border of 2^32 tweets, causing some Twitter clients to fail. A result may be that tweets don’t show up, your iPhone returns empty searches when you search for #jd09nl etc etc. I had no idea about this problem, but I did suffer its consequences. After the event I learned about Twitocalypse and I found out that Tweetie on my iPhone has this problem, but TwitterFon doesn’t! Knowing this before the event would have saved me a lot of questions, frustration and time! I suggest event organisors who want to include Twitter in their event use their website to inform people about the phenomenon and possibly feature a list of good and bad clients. As I said TwitterFon for iPhone doesn’t suffer from Twitocalypse and neither does ÜberTwitter for BlackBerry, but there may be more…

Also, keep in mind that video usually turns up presented as Flash video, supported by most desktop systems, but not by any mobile phones (iPhones, BlackBerries) and PDA’s. If your video platform supports “rewrapping” video content to .mp4, it is properly recognized by iPhone and BlackBerry. We ended up reposting all video to Youtube, which takes care of this automatically, but it takes time for Youtube to transcode video content to mobile phone friendly content. Youtube finished transcoding all video content after the event, which was a pity to find out. Try uploading a video file to Youtube and immediately check if your iPhone can find it. You’ll see it takes time and somtimes it takes a lot of time…

Last but not least: The written word

I’ve had a personal weblog for many years now. It’s running on WordPress for a number of reasons (I do like Joomla! very much. Really!) and I decided to publish my written coverage on my own personal weblog. Of course we wanted to offer one coverage experience, so we used clevercontent.nl as an “umbrella”, merging Marc’s video and my posts, using RSS syndication. That way the original author (me) and his opinion stay at the source (my weblog), enabling future changes to posts (when I’m proven wrong, I tend to revise my opinion). It turned out that this required minimal styling of my RSS feed and unfortunately there was no time to do the same for joomladays.nl, which resulted in my posts being copied and pasted. I didn’t mind as long as my name was mentioned somewhere, but of course it felt like a failure of good technology. If this would have been discussed before the event, the joomladays.nl website could have been prepared to properly syndicate my written contributions and, hell, why not everybody’s written contributions? I’m sure I wasn’t the only one present with a personal weblog, commenting on what was going on. I’m convinced clever use of RSS feeds, tag support and proper styling of the content could have made the joomladays.nl website richer and more actual, since all information can be syndicated realtime, while the event is taking place!

Make sure you add enough links when naming people (looking up their Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook account name may be useful to help building social networks and make sure you find the right user account for the right person). This will allow readers to do further background checking on people or topics.

My WordPress blog posts get tweeted (published on Twitter) automatically, as well as republishing on Facebook and Hyves, allowing everybody to read the stuff on the network they prefer. There’s lots of good and usually free plugins to take care of that. Make sure you check them out and use whichever suits you!

Also: Keep in mind that search.twitter.com only “remembers” tweets for a limited time. If you search #jd09nl after a week or two, you’ll find all old tweets are gone. If you want to keep a permanent record of hashtagged tweets, I suggest you use one of the many services that provide tweet printing (on paper or otherwise).

I thank everybody for making the #jd09nl event the success it was and I wish everbody good luck organising events, wherever they may take place. Technology may have its limits, but there are no borders involved! If you have any questions, feel free to comment on my post or contact me.

See ‘ya!

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