Tech Weekly

Twitter’s rising popularity and the huge number of Twitter-related tools and mashups has been impossible to ignore. Instead of writing a new entry every time a new one appears, it’s much more convenient for the readers it they’re all in one big categorized list. *note: this list will be constantly updated as new Twitter tools are found

Desktop clients

Triqqr - a simple, early beta Windows application for posting tweets from your desktop.
TwitBox - a Windows Vista based desktop client for viewing and updating tweets.
Twitteroo Windows Desktop client, with several advanced features, that enables you to post to Twitter from the desktop.
Twitterific - a Mac desktop client, minimal but beautifully designed and not without options
Twitterlicious - a Windows application that makes using Twitter easier.
TwitterPost - simplistic Mac desktop client for updating Twitter, coming from Apple.

Mashups

FlickrMixr - An odd Flickr/Twitter mashup that can be painfully slow at times.
Flussgeist - an unorthodox but interesting mashup between Twitter, Flickr, and several other services. It combines tweets with images, videos and an ambient soundtrack.
GeoTwitter - very similar to TwitterVision and TwitterEarth below, GeoTwitter displays Twitter updates on a world map (powered by Google Maps). Unlike the two mentioned tools, it’s not updated immediately after a new tweet appears; instead, it shows several tweets on the map and it’s updated every minute.
Swotter A contestant for the weirdest Twitter mashup out there, Swotter is “reading” books to Twitter. It’s essentially just sending lines of text from a book to a Twitter account. You can see it in action here: twitter.com/booktwo
Twapper - a mashup between the online calendar 30boxes and Twitter, created by the folks from 30boxes themselves. It works on both mobile and standard web browsers, and it’s useful even without a 30boxes account, but it offers many more options if you have one. For the full scoop of the features go over to 30boxes site.
Twitter Atlas - yet another Twitter/Live Maps mashup. It looks very sleek and it has a window with tweet history, which is a very useful feature.
Twitterami - a Frappr/Twitter mashup which shows Twitter updates on a world map. Requires registration.
TwitterEarth - similar to TwitterVision (which came first), but based on Live Maps, and works in 3D, too - at least it should, but at the time of this writing clicking on the 3D icon does nothing.
Twitterer - a Twitter/Second Life mashups, which shows updates from a certain Twitter accounts over Second Life spheres.
Twittervision - a Google Maps/Twitter mashups that lets you see Twitter updates on a world map. Works only for users who have their location set up in Twitter preferences. Read our coverage here.
TwitterMaps another Twitter/Google Maps mashup, with a simple function: find up where a Twitter user is located. You can also update your current location with a special command sent to Twitter.

Mobile

Jargong - IM client for smartphones with Twitter support.
Twapper - described above; it’s a WAP based interface for Twitter.
Twitter Flashlite - mobile application that lets you post to Twitter from your cellphone.

Plugins

Post To Twitter - a Firefox plugin that lets you post Twitter updates directly from the Firefox search bar.
Simple Twitter - a very simple Wordpress plugin that displays Twitter updates on your Wordpress blog.
Tweetbar - Firefox sidebar for easy Twitter updating. Works in Flock, too.
Twitterbar - A Firefox plugin that lets you post Twitter tweets from the Firefox address bar.
Twitter Tools - a Wordpress plugin that enables you to create blog posts out of Twitter tweets, tweet archives, or synchronize a Wordpress blog with Twitter.
Twitter Netvibes module - a Netvibes module that lets you update your status at Twitter directly from your Netvibes homepage.
TwitTwoo Another Wordpress Plugin that displays Twitter status in the sidebar of your Wordpress blog. It’s nicely designed, and it displays your Twitter avatar next to the tweets.

Tools

Autotwit lets you automate Twitter updates. Quite useless, unless you want to keep up an image of a man that never sleeps.
EmailTwitter - allows you to post Twitter updates and retrieve your Twitter timeline via your cellular phone or other e-mail enabled mobile device, without incurring SMS fees.
Mail2Twitter allows you to post tweets through e-mail, as well as any email-enabled mobile device.
RSS2Twitter - converts an RSS feed into Twitter tweets.
Twitter Badges: This comes straight from the developers of Twitter: Flash badges intended to be displayed on your website, showing your latest Twitter posts
TwitterBuzz is an interesting tool that turns Twitter into some sort of simple Digg. It displays a list of most popular links on Twitter. You can see all the Twitter messages mentioning the link.
TwitterFeed - a service that combines OpenID and Twitter to let you feed the entries on your blog to Twitter
Twitterholic keeps a top list of users based on how often the post, how many friends they have, and other factors.
Twitteromatic - a tool that posts all sorts of information (weather, Firefox updates) to Twitter automatically.
Twit This is a badge similar to the popular “Digg This” badges, which help the visitors of a web site to quickly include its URL into a Twitter post. It’s available as a Javascript snippet, a bookmarklet or a Wordpress plugin.
TwitterSearch Simple Twitter search.

Widgets

Twadget - A Windows Vista widget (Microsoft calls them gadgets for no understandable reason), which shows you the latest Twitter updates and gives you the ability to post to Twitter right from your desktop.
Yourminis Twitter widget that shows tweets, and enables you to post updates to Twitter.

Labels: Download of the day

Well if you are using Firefox. And seems like alot of folks are then a must have download is GreaseMonkey. It is a great little Firefox add-on that allows you to load a multitude of scripts that affect how a webpage acts. You can use a script from Greasemonkey to make your Gmail experience much easier to marking which RSS feeds on specific webpages you have already subscribed to. More on that tomorrow. In the meantime take a look at the GreaseMonkey SCRIPTS site and see if any of these scripts would benifit you. I know that I have found several that I have to use on a daily basis to help streamline my online experience.

Labels: Download of the day, Firefox

Well its no secret that the one thing that every Blogger needs no matter what is. Yes you guessed it subscribers. Without at least a few your post become nothing more than a overly complicated diary. I am relatively new to this whole Blogging thing. And was never much of a writer. But I have always liked Technology and especially computers. So when the Internet just sort of exploded these last 10 years I knew that I would have to try my hand at writing to a Blog.

Its still a work in process but it sure has evolved into something much nicer than my first webpage/blog that I tried my hand at many years ago. I made this site many years ago. Before Ebay had even become a household name believe it or not.

Well I would like to think that I have come a long way from that mashed up mess that I used to run a book selling business to doing something alot more

rewarding for myself which is talk about tech. Talk about the problems I encounter with it and the solutions that I find thru the journey.

When its all said and done though if that little number I referenced above doesn't ever increase it will make you wonder whether you are doing a very good job or just going thru the motions.

I am hoping for the first choice. But that remains to be seen. Check back later and see if I manage to acquire more readers. Or what the heck go ahead and join the group.

Labels: Editorial

So what do you do if you have Firefox installed and you have it setup just the way you think you want it with all the best extensions and all the most usefull GreaseMonkey Scripts and then it crashes? I had this happen to me for the first time this past week and needless to say I was a little miffed. I tried to use Windows XP's system restore to fix what ever it was that I had done to crash things. But that did not help. I tried to uninstall Firefox. Then to reinstall it. I even tried to unistall it, go to the Registry and take out all mention of Mozilla or Firefox and then reinstall just version 1.5 and try to work my way back up to the 2.0.3 version that I had been using just prior and liked so much.

Nothing seemed to work. Each time that I did one of the prior mentioned failed fixes I would get Firefox to work for the first time after install but then as soon as I closed it and tried to re-start it I would get the following error message.

I was not sure what was going on but I knew that I could not have been the only person to hose a Firefox installation so I went to Google to see if I could find an answer to my problem. I did not have any real good luck at first in finding anyway to fix whatever it was that had gone wrong with it till I happened on a posting on the Mozilla website itself for primarily for developers of Firefox extensions and add-on's as Firefox 2.0 now calls them. At this SITE I discovered the answer to my problem. I had previously uninstalled the program but I had not gotten rid of any of the personal information as far as settings and extensions that had been installed on my computer for my login. Once I read the above site and looked at the information on where to go to get to your Profile Folder I it all started to make sense. Here is a snapshot of the info from the Mozilla site. Or at least what I found most important in correcting my problem.

Knowing where your profile folder is stored can be useful if, for example, you want to make a backup of your personal data. On Windows Vista/XP/2000, the path is usually %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\, where xxxxxxxx is a random string of 8 characters. Just browse to C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ on Windows XP/2000 or C:\users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ on Windows Vista, and the rest should be obvious. On Windows 95/98/Me, the path is usually C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\ On Linux, the path is usually ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/ On Mac OS X, the path is usually ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/ %AppData% is a shorthand for the Application Data path on Windows 2000/XP/Vista. To use it, click Start > Run... (use the search box on Vista), enter %AppData% and press Enter. You will be taken to the "real" folder, which is normally C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data on Windows XP/2000, C:\users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming on Windows Vista.

What I found out is that there is a profile folder with all of your Firefox information stored in it. And most importantly for my problem there is a folder there that has the installed extensions in it. Once I found this folder I was able to delete the last extension that I had installed which I came to find did not play nice with another extension that I had installed previously and my Firefox was back up to speed and working great.

As this Mozilla site says you can also setup more than one profile so that if you are testing something with Firefox you can see how it preforms to varying degrees and not have it completely crash. To create a seperate profile follow these steps.

In order to create a new profile, you use the Profile Manager. To start the Profile Manager in Windows, follow these steps:

1. Close Firefox completely (select File > Exit from the main menu of Firefox).
2. Select Start > Run... from the Windows Start menu (use the search box on Vista).
3. Enter firefox.exe -ProfileManager and press OK.

On Linux or Mac, start Firefox with the -ProfileManager switch, e.g. ./firefox -ProfileManager (this assumes that you're in the firefox directory).

Additional resources for help with fixing Firefox can be found HERE.

Labels: Firefox