This blog begin with it’s first post on 9th May 2007. I can’t recall exactly why I start blogging, but I’m very grateful that this blog still exist until today. After 2 years and 10 months, it’s finally reached it’s 1000th post, another milestone for this blog and a quite achievement to myself. and my wife.
I shall make this short, as this is not really informative post. I’d like to thanks everyone that reading this blog, leave comments, invite us to events, sponsoring us or just dropping by to read my ‘grammatically incorrect’ posts. Without you all, I’m no longer sit here in front of my notebook and write this post.
Someone asked me how can I blogging about technology and keep myself up to date with technology, when at the same time I still working, spending more than 11 hours including commuting from and to the workplace. What’s more, I’m working in IT industry and my working time started after your lunch time and sometime after your dinner time (hope you can guess my working hours).
Well, there is no sophisticated tools, or scientific method that I use, except these 5 tools that I’ll elaborate below.
1. Twitter
Twitter need no introduction almost to everyone, it is the micro blogging service that taking the world by storm. What make Twitter is superior as news source is because, it got updated as a news broke out, or real time.
You know why? Twitter app is available in almost all smartphone platform, which means Twitter is accompanying the people wherever there go. Or , there are also SMS service provided by certain carries that let you tweet using your ‘regular’ phone, as long as it support texting or SMS.
In Twitter, these are 3 areas to look upon.
List - Most useful of all. List allow you to organize information by grouping the twitter account you follows based on the topic. For instance, nowadays, more companies jump to Twitter and use their account as one of the vehicle in doing announcement, promotion or customer service. So here is where it make sense. Let say you want to follow telecommunication news, so group all twitter account belong to these companies under one list, called Telco for instance. Beside that, you can subscribe to the list the twitter account that you follow as well.
Search - Use the search function to find the conversation about the topic that you’re interested
Trending - The hot trend currently in Twitter. It can be manipulate using the hash # tag.
2. Techmeme.com
What is Techmeme. WikiAnswer best definite it as “Techmeme is a website that aggregates the top tech news stories from the most prominent technology oriented websites”. Techmeme is one of my favorite website, which has contributed to hundreds of posts I made in this blog. If you’re looking for tech tops news, beside Twitter, here is the right place to do so.
3. Google reader
Wikipedia define Google Reader as “Web-based aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds online or offline” . So you have tonnes of website that you frequently read or you bookmark them for later read. It is almost impossible to visit these websites to read the new content daily. RSS reader such as Google Reader fill up the gap by allow users to subscribe to the RSS of that websites. You read, comment, share bookmark the content you find interesting within the Google Reader itself. All in one, is that beauty?
4. Google Alert
What is Google Alert anyway? The definition by Google - “Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic”. So let say you want to stay update on Nokia’s latest new, set ‘Nokia’ as the topic in Google Alert, which will send the to your email on the frequency that your comfortable with. Create as many as Google Alert to fit your needs. For me, I have dozens of Google Alert set up for different topic of my interest.
5. Smartphone with data service
Of all that I suggest above, this is going to be the most important. If you can afford it, go get one and you won’t ever regret it. Smartphone with data has 3 basic things that make it appeal to everyone.
It is portable, fit in your pocket, light and the battery life is long lasted than.. let say netbook.
You can get your email on the go, stay updated with your social networks through the social apps or webs and browsing website anywhere you want.
This is all in one device you ever need.You can play games if you bored, listen to music, capture picture and etc, not to forget it’s main feature as communication device.
Most of the time, I read all websites stated above using smartphone, except when I’ve found the content and ready to write, I’ll switch to my notebook.
All 3 websites stated above has it’s own mobile version. The ‘normal’ website is tough to read in your smartphone. The mobile version of this website will show bigger font and convenient to be read from smartphone’s small screen. The mobile optimized website also usually simple and less cluttered, less graphic which mean it will load faster in your mobile web browser.
So you say you have notebook that got wireless broadband connection. It’s true that it offer almost the same convenient as smartphone, but imagine if you’re commuting a lot. You’re not full time blogger who have luxury of working from home; you spending a lot of time outside of your home. That’s where smartphone is what it is design for. Connecting you to the world of information regardless of space, time or border
In attempt not to make you feel ‘bored’ during long holiday season, here is the Wordpress 2.9, freshly released by Wordpress team yesterday. To make your holiday even more ‘meaningful’,version 2.9.1 was released to fixed some issue soon after that. Isn’t that nice?
Among all feature loaded into Wordpress 2.9, these might tempt you to upgrade right away!
Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.
Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.
Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.
Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).
Wordpress 2, which available for download in App Store beginning yesterday is entirely new application in iPhone. So if you have previous version installed, you wouldn’t be alerted the availability of the new version. While it is unclear why they start over from scratch, this are some of enhancement made on Wordpress 2.
A new, more efficient user interface that makes it faster to switch between comments, posts, and pages.
Various user interface refinements and bug fixes
New Comments interface, with Gravatars and the author URL shown in the comment list
Passwords are now stored in the keychain
Posts are now automatically saved and restored if network connection is lost during publishing
Added persistence, so the app re-opens in the blog you last used
Added an interface for manually entering the XMLRPC endpoint for non-standard setups
Fixed rotation-related visual glitches
Fixed errors where malformed XML prevented access to XMLRPC endpoint
Fixed edge case where local drafts were sometimes not saved
Fixed the order of photos so that they’re displayed in the order they’re uploaded
My experience using Wordpress in iPhone is limited due to my preference of larger screen when I’m writing something complex. Managing comments is the most frequently used function, it’s handy because I can manage comments whenever I want and it saved my times a lot when I’m in front of computer.
To me, Wordpress in iPhone is undoubtedly a great application, but it suit most for photoblog or personal blog, that require less writing and research. Not to forget the person on the go, that have litle time to put their thought into the piece of post called internet. Wordpress 2 front screen
Don’t be surprised if your Wordpress.com blog has iPhone apps looks alike when you browsed it from iPhone or Android smartphone. This impressive interface change is the work of WPTouch plugin, which was rolled out by Wordpress few days ago to all Wordpress.com blogs.
Not all smartphone capable of displaying such interface within their web browser. For other smart phone, Wordpress still provide mobile friendly looks to the Wordpress.com blog as well, using Wordpress Mobile Edition plugin. Although it still have better readability, but its looks less beauty than what WPTouch can do.
Apart from beauty and better readability (font is big, hiding original theme) its load faster in mobile browser as well.
Wordpress hosted blog who wish to have similar looks like their peer in Wordpress.com, cab grab the plugin and activate it. Just make sure you aware that,unlike Wordpress.com blog, if your blog viewed on non iPhone or Android smartphone, normal view will be showed instead.
Enjoy the screen shot taken from this blog on iPhone.
p/s: for those who don’t know, Wordpress.com is free blog hosted by Wordpress.com using Wordpress as the CMS as well
Home view -top
Home view - bottom
Single post view
Comment Section
Drop down menu beside the header
Click the small arrow beside the title to expand the post
