I’ve been using ÜberTwitter for some time now and in fact it’s the only serious BlackBerry application for Twitter.

Unfortunately the started using ads a little while ago, which really bugged me, although I understand the wish of the developers to make a living out of it.

I happened to see the possibility to pay $5 and get rid of the ads (the ad supported version remains free of charge), which makes it the perfect app for me. It’s well worth the money! Do you have a BlackBerry? Take yours to the address below and pay those lousy $5. Happy tweeting!

Get ÜberTwitter – The only Twitter Client for your BlackBerry!

Technical evolution makes hard drives bigger and cheaper. Today, we have bigger files and more pictures and video’s on our computers than ever before.

Are these files safe? Do you have a backup of there beautiful memories? Even today, in 2010 a lot of computer still don’t have a proper backup.

Imaging the following scenario: What happens if your hard drive crashes today? What is safe and what isn’t? After reading this post you have no more excuse for not having a backup of your home computer (corporate servers are a different league).

Today, we have Wuala! Wuala is a free noline service that allows you to store your files. When you open your free account, you get 1 or 2 GB free of charge. You can use Wuala as a web drive, allowing manual storage of your files, but you can also use Wuala as a backup solution. In that case just point to a folder (directory) and tell Wuala to keep a synchronized copy in the cloud.

Wuala keeps all your stored files encrypted. Your files can only be retrieved with your password. Remember: If you lose your Wuala password, there’s no way to recover your files!

Every file Wuala stores is chopped to pieces and kept in (a minimum of 5) different places on the internet. Nerd note: This is done using P2P (Torrent) technology.

Wuala allows you to buy storage, but you can also trade local disk space for online disk space. If your PC has been online for a while Wuala will inform you that you can trade storage. The more you trade, the more you gain.

All files are private files by default. If you have friends or colleagues using Wuala you can share folders with them. If they wish to download a file from one of your shared folders, they don’t only download from your PC (it may not even be switched on), but the file comes from the collective, making downloads a lot faster!

You can use Wuala on more than one computer and it runs on Java, so it works on Windows, Mac and Linux! I keep a Windows Media Center PC at home (powered by Windows 7). It is always on and online. I traded 30 local GB’s for (almost) the same amount of online storage. I’m using this space to keep a backup of my laptop files, while I have easy access to these files from my home computer!

Please note: If you want to use Wuala as a backup solution, you need a Wuala Pro account, which you will get automatically when you buy or trade storage. If you join through a friend you get 1 GB free storage extra (as does your friend). It pays to makes friends on the Wuala network.

If you use the link below, you can become a 2 GB Wuala member as my friend

Wuala – Secure Online Storage – Backup. Store. Share. Access Everywhere.

Last year we saw the announcement and release of Google Wave.

For those who didn’t get it: Google Wave is a Hosted Conversation Service. Google thought: “If email were invented today instead of 40 years ago, what would it look like?”.

Rather than sending endless emails to each other, Wave allows you to start a conversation at one central place and involve other people, yes even entire websites!

If all of this doesn’t ring a bell, have a look at: http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html
There is short video (2 minutes) that explains in plain english what Wave is all about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8wXnVRnYdc

You can get a Wave account through an Invite, just like Gmail at its time. I still have tons of invites left, so if you’re not on Wave yet and I made you curious, let me know and I’ll send you your invite. Invites can be received at any random email address, but I discovered that invites to Gmail addresses actually take longer to arrive! Once you have your invite, you can subscribe to Wave using a Google Account (can be a different address than the one your invite was sent to). If you don’t have Google Account yet, you can create one on-the-fly and you’re ready to go. In the end you get a new address within Google Wave, which, funny enough, doesn’t allow you to receive email… Your Wave address ends in @googlewave.com and it allows others to add you to their Wave. I use daepunt everywhere, but unfortunately daepunt@googlewave.com wasn’t available, so if you want to share your Wave with me, add puntdae@googlewave.com instead.

The first thing I came across once I got started with Wave, was the interface. The screen looks like an interesting mix between Gmail and Google Docs (a chaos I never got used to). Wave is still in beta, so try not to use it for life/death stuff. On the other hand: If you’re not using it for serious purposes, how will you ever find out what it can/can’t do?

We’re using Wave in a production environment, which makes us discover interesting stuff on a daily basis. I’d like to share a few of those things.

The first thing I immediately missed was mobile support. I have a BlackBerry and an iPhone and a I perform a significant part of my job on the road. Google Wave runs within a browser and there’s no mobile support yet. There are numerous non-official Wave applications for the iPhone, but I’m always very careful with that. Those Apps require you to save your name and password and after that, you have no idea what happens to them. No, thanks! I’ll wait for the official Google App, although you might wonder if your name, password and data are safer with Google…

Google intends to turn Wave into an open platform, allowing the whole world to develop my mobile BlackBerry/iPhone App. But until that day comes, you’re stuck to a browser on a PC. The smartest thing I found was a FireFox Add-On, allowing you to see your unread Waves at the bottom of your FireFox screen: https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/14973

Wave is still work in progress. My browser hangs a lot and today I discovered that it’s impossible to “unshare” someone, after you accidentally added the wrong person to your Wave. This means you have to be very careful when sharing Waves. Fortunately there is a way to copy existing Wave content to a new Wave (so your data doesn’t get lost), allowing you to share your stuff with the right people. You will then discover that there’s no way to permanently delete your old Wave! Emptying it or stuffing it with bogus is the only way to get rid of a Wave you accidentally shared with a wrong contact. Be careful with sharing (especially with the wrong people) because this is also a way to connect people to each other, which may not always be your intention…

Despite these quirks I see huge potential for Wave. There are people who worry about Google’s influence on our daily lives and I think it’s important to worry about privacy. Yet, I think Google is no bigger threat than Microsoft and we need to consider the options here. We should choose between existing possibilities instead of theoretical, non-existing products/services.

All progress is achieved step by step and taking active part in new developments enables you to stay involved and up-to-date. I don’t know if Google Wave will remain to exist in five years, but I see potential for a service like Wave. And Wave being Open Source creates spinoff projects, allowing you to run your own corporate in-house Wave server. That solves the privacy argument against Google and I reckon we might very well be installing local Wave servers in SMB companies, which are currently dominated by Microsoft Exchange only, anywhere between now and five years…

I wish you all a happy 2010 and I hope we will continue to see beautiful developments!

From: BlackBerry Network Administrator
Subject: BlackBerry Messenger Software v5.0.0.57 Update Available
Sent: 23 dec. 2009 20:20

A new version of BlackBerry® Messenger software is now available. If you are currently running version 5.0.0.55 or 5.0.0.56 of BlackBerry Messenger, please upgrade to version 5.0.0.57 as soon as possible. This version addresses issues with versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56.

To download the most current version of BlackBerry Messenger software, please visit www.blackberry.com/blackberrymessenger and follow the on-screen instructions. Please note that the software update is available free of charge, however downloading and using applications over the wireless network may incur data usage charges depending on your service plan. Please check with your airtime service provider for information about service costs. If you have any questions about this update, please visit www.blackberry.com/support/messenger.

Thank you,
Research In Motion Limited

©2009 Research In Motion Limited. All rights reserved. BlackBerry®, RIM®, Research In Motion®, SureType®, SurePress™ and related trademarks, names and logos are the property of Research In Motion Limited and are registered and/or used in the U.S. and countries around the world.

Are you using a BlackBerry? Go to the above URL and get the latest version of BlackBerry Messenger!

If you have a BlackBerry, taking screenshots can be a great help when making manuals.
You can do this by using a tool called loader.exe, which is a part of the BlackBerry Desktop Manager.
This program can be found in folder C:\Program Files\Common Files\Research in Motion\AppLoader (on 32 bit systems). On 64 bit PC’s it is the C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Research in Motion\AppLoader folder.

Connect the BlackBerry to your PC, open a Command Prompt, go to the directory mentioned above and start:

loader.exe /screenshot filename.bmp

to take a ‘picture’ of your BlackBerry’s active screen.

You can find more information and options in Research in Motion’s KB17215:

Use loader.exe to take screenshots of your BlackBerry

Earlier I wrote about the possiblity to share your Twitter Favorites (for example to Twitter, via TwitterFeed).
I assumed this would be possible some day and today I figured out that it works! If you run into a nice video on YouTube, it’s easy to mark it as a Favorite. RSS allows you to share your YouTube Favorites with your friends (or Followers on Twitter).
If you have an iPhone, you can set a Favorite by pressing a single button, allowing quick and easy sharing.

In fact: the approach is exactly the same as sharing your Twitter Favorites. You just need the URL address of your YouTube Favorites.
Go to www.youtube.com and log in using your account. If you don’t have one yet, sign up (you can use your Google account), so you can get started!

Your Favorites on YouTube

Go to your Favorites and check the URL in the address bar (click the picture to enlarge it)). Notice the orange RSS icon. YouTube automatically creates a dynamic RSS feed of your Favorites and we’re going to use it.
Click the orange RSS icon:

Your Favorites on YouTube as an RSS feed

Write down (or copy) the address of your YouTube Favorites and use this RSS feed as an input source for TwitterFeed. Just like the Twitter Favorites, you can run this feed through Yahoo!Pipes to add or manipulate the stream. If you’re interested in who’s clicking your favorites, you might consider using Google FeedBurner. Yes, FeedBurner even allows you to set up an automatically generated Newsletter by email with your favorite video’s…

And Bob’s your uncle! As soon as you mark a video as a Favorite on YouTube, TwitterFeed can now send out a tweet to Twitter. Of course you can replace Twitter by MySpace, Facebook or even your weblog…

Good luck!

I wrote about Woopra earlier, which allows you to view live website traffic, unlink Google Analytics, which has about a one day delay.
If you have a high traffic website Woopra looks very impressive! @marcned made a cool video to demonstrate this:

Have you been using Google Analytics to find out who’s been visiting your website? After all: knowing beats guessing, right?
Although the one day delay in Google’s statistics was always bothering me. Well, Woopra does it live! With a world map that could have escaped straight from a James Bond movie, telling you who’s visiting your website right now and even how (s)he got there! You can even start a live chat with your visitors. It’s great! Free beta testing closes today, so make sure you get a free account and sign up your website(s!) for beta testing approval ASAP!

Woopra – Web Statistics 2.0

Are you looking for a good, reliable and free TFTP Server for upgrading software of your switch, firewall or router?

Try TFTP Server from SolarWinds!

TFTP, Free TFTP Server, TFTP Server: Free Network Monitoring Tools from SolarWinds

Tip: If you want to know if a program is 32-bit of 64-bit, you can use FileVer.exe to find out.

How to use the Filever.exe tool to obtain specific information about a file in Windows

Are you worried about the security of your WordPress blog and do you want to upgrade it to the latest version?

If you’re using WordPress MU, you’ll probably run into an error.

Read the following link and find out how make one tiny change to a file can repair WordPress MU’s auto upgrade feature.

WordPress MU › WordPress MU Forums » Upgrade to WPMU 2.8.2 failed

The next trick I discovered “by accident”, when I realised it is, in fact, very cool:

If you’re on Twitter, you can use your browser or client on your phone (iPhone, BlackBerry) to mark (or unmark) a tweet as a Favorite with just one single click. This allows you to quickly mark a tweet while you’re on the road and read it later on, when you’re comfortable behind a computer with a nice big screen.

When you go to the page of your Twitter account and click Favorites, you’ll see the orange RSS icon in the address bar of your browser. Click it, to see the address of the RSS feed of your Twitter Favorites.

This RSS feed you can use on your weblog and use it yourself, but it also allows you to share your Favorites with the readers of your weblog!

Tip: You can manipulate or add stuff to your Twitter Favorites RSS feed by feeding it to Yahoo Pipes and if you make a Feedburner feed out of it, your list of Favorites suddenly becomes an “intelligent” feed, allowing you to add interaction to it. Read my Crash Course FeedBurner for more information on the use of FeedBurner. And if you’re really into it, you can even use TwitterFeed to have your newly added Favorites tweeted to your followers! Now, how cool is that?!?

Some things you can prepare ahead, but when it comes to email, you can only write drafts and keep them until it’s actually time to send them out.

Free service Deferred Sender lets you send your emails now, allowing you to have them actually sent out at the time you decide.

Be careful! Make sure you read the Terms and Conditions very well. As you may know, email crosses the planet in plain text and delivery between sender and receiver always goes through hops, rather than directly. Without special measures anyone can read your incoming and outgoing email (Deferred Sender changes nothing about that).

Do you care about privacy? Then, consider the use of encryption. Contact our office for more information about encryption and email.

Deferred Sender

Are you using Citrix’s (free) XenServer and would you like it to shutdown its vm‘s (virtual machines) (was well as the Xen host itself, of course) after the light has gone out in your server room? Article Citrix Knowledge Base article CX119910 Citrixdescribes how to do this. Mind you: You need a Windows Server with APC PowerChute installed…

Make sure your Xen host is plugged in to the same UPS as one of your (physical) Windows Servers. Install Citrix’s management software (XenCenter) on this Windows Server. XenCenter contains a tiny program named xe.exe, which allow you to shutdown your vm’s and eventually your host. Write a batch file shutdown.cmd that your Windows Server executes after power blackout and Bobs your uncle!

Be aware: this shutdown.cmd file needs proper protection, as it contains paswords, necessary to shutdown the vm’s and the host!!

CTX119910 – How to Integrate XenServer and APC PowerChute – Citrix Knowledge Center

A new phenomenon in Social Networking I discovered today, is Aardvark.

Aardvark is a network that allows you to ask questions or to answer them. You can link your Twitter account to, for instance, your Windows Live Messenger account, which Aardvark will then use to ask people’s questions (if they match your expertise or interests).
There’s nothing to it! No software to download or install. Just click the link and get your free account.

In your Aardvark profile you can indicate your areas of expertise and off you go!
I subscribed earlier today and I already helped people get answers to their questions. Whenever you help somebody, Aardvark tweets that you did on your behalf.

Are you offline? Don’t worry. Aardvark will email you the answer to your question. Does Aardvark send you a question that you can’t answer? Reply lmk (let me know) to Aardvark and it will ask the user to share the answer they got with you eventually. It’s great!

Try it yourself and maybe we’ll be in touch soon. Who knows!

Follow @vark on Twitter

2009-07-15. Example: Writer @VeronicavS was looking for a logo for her books on profiler Althea Sang Min Molin. I didn’t know that, until I checked out the facts afterwards… Yesterday I got a question through Aardvark from somebody in Sweden, who wanted to know how Althea is written in korean. I explained him how it’s done and click this link to see what happened. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the power of Aardvark & Social Networking. Great!

2009-09-18. There’s an Aardvark App for your iPhone!

I really love my BlackBerry and I really love WordPress. Earlier this week, an application was released that brings the two together: WordPress for BlackBerry. Great!

Now, I speak more than just one language and I’m using WPML to make my weblog multilingual. Great!

Problem is: I can’t use WordPress for BlackBerry to post in any other language than the native language of my weblog (which is Dutch). Now, I could post using my BlackBerry and change the language with a browser afterwards, but that’s probably the least interesting option. Besides: I understand it probably doesn’t make sense for WordPress to add built-in support for just WPML. Therefore I think it could be interesting for WordPress to investigate the possibility of supporting plugins within a wider context.
If the owner of a WordPress blog uses and trusts a certain plugin, why wouldn’t the WordPress for BlackBerry (don’t forget the iPhone) app “inherit” additional database fields, post features and offer there through the app?

Amir told me he hasn’t got a BlackBerry (yet) so I posted a few pictures to illustrate:

Thanks for reading this and feel free to comment or contact to me.

(well, actually this is a manually translated post, not posted by WordPress for BlackBerry, since it won’t let me post a translated version of the original post I wrote in Dutch. This is just to keep you English readers up to date)

This is a test post. I noticed that I can add Tags to this post, but no Categories. Of course, I wonder if and how it shows up on my blog.

Let’s not put in a picture just yet, although it is supported…

I can’t tell the app which Language my post is in, so I can only write this in my blog’s native language, which is Dutch… I wonder if the authors of this application will contact the guys from WPML, or maybe they can make it even smarter, by supporting Plugin driven posts…

EDIT: Of course it is possible to indicate a Category. You just have to press the BlackBerry Option button.

The current stable version of WordPress is 2.8

Do you have a weblog that you don’t want to break, but don’t mind if it did? Maybe you like to check out the latest experimental version 2.9, that is being programmed during daytime and which can be downloaded at night. The updates go by the romantic name of “Nightly Builds”, which is exactly what they are… Be careful not to set fire to your blog! We’re talking pre-alpha code here!

WordPress – Download – Nightly Builds

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!

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…

Once your BlackBerry BES Server is up and running, there are many reasons why you’d like to change the Service Account afterwards. One of those reasons could be that you didn’t pick a separatre BESAdmin account during the initial installation. Taking care of that (even afterwards) is probably a good idea.

Research in Motion describes in article KB04293 how to take care of this (click the link for KB04293).

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).

If you want to compare Google, Yahoo and Bing, try taking a blind test at http://blindsearch.fejus.com/

Enter your search query and vote for the result that satisfies you most. The site will then reveal which search engine was responsible for which result…

If you put your ear to the railroad (make sure there’s no train coming!), you can hear what’s going on. That’s exactly what Laura Chappell did to “hear” the traffic that crosses your network as soon as you use Twitter. She captured all traffic (in so called WireShark Trace Files) and she wrote two amazing reports about it (one about Twitter in general and one about TweetDeck). The available trace files will help you to follow her steps of research. Try it yourself! Interesting!

Chappell University Projects Page

Imagine: You’re runing an Ubuntu box with a modem connected to it. You don’t want to use it for dialing out to the internet (that’s how it was done last millennium), but you want to set it up as a dial-in server. It’s strange, but most of the online manuals I found don’t cover this, so I will.

You need to configure a PPP dialin server and we’ll do exactly that in the next few steps:

1. You need mgetty. Install mgetty by using the following command:
   

   sudo apt-get install mgetty

2. Copy /etc/event.d/tty1 to /etc/event.d/ttyS0 (ttyS0 = COM1; ttyS1 = COM2 etc). The last line of /etc/ttyS0 contains a line that goes like:
   

   exec /sbin/getty 38400 tty1

   Change it, so it says:

   exec /sbin/mgetty -s 57600 -D /dev/ttyS0

3. If you have an /etc/ppp/options, back it up by using the following command:
   

   sudo mv /etc/ppp/options /etc/ppp/options.bak

   and make sure /etc/ppp/options looks like this:

   lock
   10.0.0.1:10.0.0.2 #The first address is the address you can use to access your server and the second address is the one that is asigne to your PC after the connection comes up

4. Make sure to create an /etc/ppp/options.ttyS0 with the following content:
   

   10.0.0.1:10.0.0.2

   That’s it. Nearly done.

5. The last thing on our list is to define dialin users in /etc/ppp/pap-secrets. Remember: this file is (or should be) protected. Use:
   

   sudo nano -w /etc/ppp/pap-secrets

   to change it. Make sure it has the following line somewhere:

   user        *        password        *

   Example:

   johndoe        *        secret        *

Done! Let me know if it worked for you.

If your Microsoft Exchange 2003 Server is tight on available disk space and you discovered it’s the MDBDATA directory that is filled with Exxxxxxx.LOG files (each 5MB big) and there’s many of them, the following article may be for you.

Remember: A good backup of your Microsoft Exchange database should automatically flush the log files (if everything is normal, the log files that are no longer needed are deleted by your backup software), so if this normal behaviour fails, checking the need for those log files to remain present is step one, step two is to delete the unneeded log files and step three is to check your backup solution. Updates may be available and be sure to watch your backup status (and your MDBDATA directory) closely. Happy hunting!

Microsoft: Exchange 2003 – Transaction Logs are not clearing

I mentioned TetherBerry earlier. Unfortunately my BlackBerry Bold, running OS 4.6.0.266 didn’t work and I tried downgrading to 4.6.0.247, but that didn’t solve anything either.

I got an e-mail from one of their support guys today and it seems they have a beta that I can try. Cool!

TetherBerry | The Web Anywhere

If it fails, like in my case, try the beta:

XP or Vista 32bit: http://www.tetherberry.com/downloads/beta/setup.exe
or
XP or Vista 64bit: http://www.tetherberry.com/downloads/beta/setup-x64.exe

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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