I’ve put my belongings (including my computers ) into storage while I await the hand-over of keys on the 4^th of March, then the arduous process of actually moving my stuff in and setting up the place.  Of course my PC will be the first thing I set up but I don’t know that I’ll have any net access straight away, at least until the relocating process goes through.
In the meantime I’m sojourning at my dad’s place:  enjoying the cuisine, spending time with my little brothers, and whiling away the few spare hours I get watching Cartoon Network. It’s not too bad at all, but it would probably be a lot more enjoyable if I didn’t have to work.

So, until I move in and get set up properly there may not be any major postings here, though I may still keep up with my twittering as I’m able.
Once I’m in and settled I’ll also post up some pics —maybe even do some before and after shots.  We’ll see.

Until then, take care, keep up with my tweets, and check out the following useful (and fun) web finds after the jump.

MaxTo

MaxTo is a small Windows program that divides your monitors into regions. When you maximize a window, it will no longer fit the entire screen, but only the region it was maximized into. Your windows are neatly organized into the grid you have defined when they are maximized. MaxTo has been described as a tiling window manager.

MaxTo is light-weight, and works on both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista. The .NET framework version 2.0 or higher is required (preinstalled on Windows Vista).

WizMouse

WizMouse is a mouse enhancement utility that makes your mouse wheel work on the window currently under the mouse pointer, instead of the currently focused window. This means you no longer have to click on a window before being able to scroll it with the mouse wheel. This is a far more comfortable and practical way to make use of the mouse wheel.

Obamicon.me

The longest election season in memory is now over, and we wanted to help you unwind and express yourself as we head into the new era.

Make your own “Obamicon” — your image in a style inspired by Shepard Fairey’s iconic poster. Regardless of your candidate of choice in the 2008 election, here’s your chance to sound-off.

Take your picture with a webcam or upload a photo, choose your own message, and submit to the gallery.

AutoPager

The AutoPager Firefox extension automatically loads the next page of a site inline when you reach the end of the current page for infinite scrolling of content. AutoPager works with a ton of sites, including Lifehacker, of course, Google …….

Unlike other auto paging scripts, this add-on works well with most other add-ons like adblock plus, WOT and most of the greasemonkey scripts.

Peace.

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Apologies for the premature post notification. I still find myself accidentally pressing the Publish button before I’m actually meant to.

Also, as an anecdotal note, I had initially thought to call this post by a different name, but during my research I discovered an application named after the made-up word I had chosen —Twitterrific!— here I was trying to come up with the silliest name I could fathom, only to find it’s taken.  Go figure.

So in order to avoid confusion I’m going with this new one. 

So I’ve been using Twitter for quite a while now.  It’s short message format is easy to follow, keep up with, and use on a daily basis.  I’ve found it to be not only convenient and fun, but useful and on occasion even very informative.

For those who’ve been living under a rock  in ignorance of the popular trends in modern communication, Twitter is:

…a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Overall, it does the job quite well, and as I said before it’s so simple to use that even a child could own and manage an account.

But apart from being a good place for keeping in touch with other people who don’t subscribe to using instant messengers, Twitter is also a good repository for your random thoughts and ideas, useful online finds, and your perhaps sporadic but precious pearls of wisdom. 

Also, you may find it useful to know that a twit is the term used to refer to the owner of a twitter account, and tweet is the term used to refer to a short message posted on Twitter.  With that in mind, read on.

Smart Twittering

If you’re about to get into the Twitter world, you’re going to want to get the best out of the service from the very beginning.  The same is true for a user who has been using it since its inception; you want to make your experience as seamless and efficient as possible.
To that end, and for your convenience, here is a list of tools I think you may find most useful:

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a multi-platform desktop Twitter client.  This means you can post, view and manage your tweets directly from your desktop without having to visit the Twitter website.  You can also view tweets posted by friends and those people you’ve chosen to follow all from the one single application.
This application is built on Adobe’s AIR framework and will require you to install the framework before installing the application, but the TweetDeck installer should take care of everything.

Twhirl

If you don’t like TweetDeck or would prefer another, more compact flavour of desktop Twitter client, then try this little beauty.  This client, also built on AIR, has all the features of TweetDeck, but ups the ante by offering multiple account support, but that’s not where it ends.  Its featureset is rich and packed with quick time-saving functions, all accessible from the small, yet very usable interface.  And for those who are picky about looks, it also boasts the ability to change the colour scheme of the interface. A full list of features is available at a glance from its homepage.
This application is also built on AIR and will run on most, if not all platforms.

TweetBurner

Once you get the hang of tweeting and sharing links, you may want to start tracking the kind of response those links get from your followers.  With TweetBurner you can view statistics on each and every link you share, from how many clicks, to which is most popular.  It’s a useful tool if you share a lot of links and are interested in statistics.
At the time of writing this site is experiencing some technical difficulties which prohibit the viewing of personal pages and tracking newly added links, but hopefully this will be rectified soon.

TweetStats

Once you’ve been twittering for a while, you may want some graphical statistical information about your posting habits.  TweetStats offers this in various categories displayed in neat, easy to understand graphs.  In addition to displaying your own stats, it also allows you to see what other topics are currently popular in the twittersphere.
Not much more need be said on this.

Mr. Tweet

Mr. Tweet helps you easily build meaningful relationships by looking through your network and tweets. He will regularly:

1. Suggest good people and followers you are missing out on
2. Recommend you to enthusiastic users relevant to you
3. Regularly update useful stats of your Twitter usage

I thought of making my own description for this one but I really couldn’t have put it better. 

TwittyTunes

For those of us who use Firefox on a regular basis, this may come in very handy.  TwittyTunes is a Firefox plugin that allows you to quickly share a message about what you’re currently doing from a number of preset messages —from what website you’re currently browsing, to what song you’re listening to
If you want this plugin to be able to post your periodic musical tastes you’ll need to install the FoxyTunes plugin also.  Don’t let that put you off though, FoxyTunes allows you to control your music player (almost all available players) directly from your browser and it’s quite configurable.  It also finds lyrics, covers, videos, artist bios, plust a range of other useful info. A pretty great combo really.

TweetShrink

If you ever find your tweet being just that little bit longer than the 140 character limit imposed by Twitter, head over to TweetShrink, paste it in there and watch it work its magic.  It will replace certain words with numbers (i.e. to = 2), among other word- shortening gymnastics and shave off those extra precious characters.
While it’s not perfect in its execution, it does sometimes help and worth having in your Twitter toolkit.

Twitzer

An alternative to having to shrink your messages to make them fit into Twitter’s restrictive 140 character system is to totally blow that out of the water by using Twitzer.  This Firefox plugin will allow you to messages to Twitter as long as you need them to be.  It does this by using the ShortText.com service to host the entire body of text you input, and feeds Twitter the first 140 characters but keeps a link between what’s on ShortText and what’s on Twitter, allow you to De-Twitzer to view the longer text.  But I’m really just making it sounds more complicated than it really is.
Suffice it to say it’s a great tool if you find you want more space to write what you need.

This is only a small sample of the veritable bevy of other tools out there you may find useful. I’ve chosen only to list those I’ve found to be some of the best.

Further Tips

While the benefits you derive from using it hinge largely upon the types of people you follow, there’s no reason why a user who has yet to find decent twits to follow can’t benefit from it for themselves. It all comes down to how you use it.
Here’s a few useful tips:

Do

• Make a habit of posting your most useful random thoughts and online findings.  You never know when someone else might find them useful.
• Keep in mind that you may have an audience, no matter how small it may be. Keep them interested.
• Make use of URL shortening services when posting links, and give a short description of it in the tweet.
• Check out your followers’ pages and follow them if you’re really interested in what they have to say.

Don’t

• Post too many nonsensical or silly posts. They may be seen useless or spam by your followers and may lead them to stop following you.
• Post links that may contain inappropriate or questionable content; or if you must, mark it as NSFW for those who tweet from work during their lunch breaks.
• Follow every single twit you come across hoping they’ll follow you back.  It’s not really a popularity contest and having thousands of tweets to catch up on doesn’t really help you keep things efficient.

If you have any other useful tips, tricks or suggestions, feel free to list them below.

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ERROR…

To cut a long story short, after a little Google and WP Forums sleuthing, I was informed that I must’ve missed uploading a couple of files. So I went through the whole upload process again and voila, all was well again and I proceeded to update the site’s database and get the site back in running order.

Back in the day I used to have a little more help and direction when dealing with WordPress issues, but these days I’m pretty much learning to fly solo. Not an altogether negative experience, but it has it’s learning curve. Besides, I’m pretty cluey and resourceful, and I enjoy the odd puzzle now and then… although, not the frustration that comes with it.

Anyways, I got everything running smoothly again, except my front page preview images were all screwy and low res. So I went to the NextGEN Gallery settings and lo and behold, I had to update the plugin. So I did. After that rigmarole, my preview images don’t show at all. The image links work OK, as they display the ALT text, but the images have gone AWOL, and it seems to be directly related to the NGGallery.
And that’s where I’m at now.

I’ve done some sleuthing and searching for answers but so far have found none, but it seems to be that some sites have problems after the upgrade since I’m not the only one who’s encountered this.
I’ll keep looking around and posting on forums, emailing people and what-not until I get it fixed, I guess.

In the meantime, please bear with me while I get this sorted or find some other alternative.

WPAU

Coincidentally, during my search for answers I came across something that might make future upgrades a little easier. The WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin..

According to the site this plugin “automatically upgrades your wordpress version to the latest files provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.”

It looks to be fairly straight forward and by all accounts seems to do the job so I kinda look forward to trying it out for the next upgrade.

Now I’m off to work….

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It’s been a while since I last posted on here, hasn’t it?

Well, I got somewhat discouraged at WordPress and some other stuff and the headaches it was giving me affected my creativity but I think I’ve managed to get that all worked out now.  In addition, my sister’s family came to stay with us for a while so the house was a somewhat busy (and noisy!) there for a while.    My younger brother also graced us with his presence, so it was somewhat of a family get-together.

And on top of that, I’ve been working on some icons for the 2008 GUI Championships.

Shutter Reloaded Headaches

Basically, what was happening was that the way I was using the Shutter Reloaded plugin for WordPress to display image previews on one of my posts was causing some major drama and the post just wouldn’t save after a certain number of either characters or perhaps images were shown in the post.  So I had to troubleshoot for a while, but I think I finally resolved it with a little help (yup, you guessed it.. Steph saves the day again ). 

It seems that what I was doing was adding way too many characters or something and it made the post choke or some such so it wouldn’t even save.  Once I’d cleaned out the superfluous code however, things got a little better and I was able to continue with the post, which coincidentally, needs only a final proofread and I’ll be able to post it. 

The Gonzalez family visit

My sister Carol and her husband, their son and newest daughter flew from Mt. Isa in Queensland to grace us with their presence.  During their visit, they lodged in our humble abode and managed to displace me from my usually quiet study, in which I would normally be found up until midnight on most nights… except while they were here. 

Anyways, I got to meet my newest niece and see my youngest nephew also.  Lily (aka. Lily-Bean) was cute, (mostly) quiet and smiley little thing.  She has a habit of breaking out in a huge but cute toothless grin at the slightest provocation.

We pretty much all took advantage of their company while they were here, though “some” (no names given ) managed to monopolize their time more than others.

Lil’ bro also visits

Juan also stopped by for a visit.  He stayed at dad’s and was pretty much visible around town and at our various family functions. He’s a bit dorky but it’s always good to have him around.

Got you that time, didn’t I, Juan? 

Icons for the GUI Championships

Aside from all that, I’ve been working on an icon package which I will submit to compete in the 2008 GUI Championships.

The bi-annual event, “is an inter-website contest in which top graphic designers from around the world compete for $15,000 in cash and prizes.”

So I’ve been hard at work coming up with nice looking-concepts for each icon and getting them drawn and endlessly tweaking them in order to bring them to life so you can enjoy them on your desktops with a little help from IconPackager.

So here’s a small taste of what’s in store.  Bear in mind that these are only small previews of individual icons.

Site Update

After all the drama with the posts, I also finally managed to get the site updated to the latest version of WordPress.  The process was a bit involved and time-consuming but it all seems to have gone off without a hitch and as a bonus I have a complete backup of my site just in case something awful should happen. 

So that’s about all for now.  Keep an eye out for part 1 of the logo tutorial mentioned earlier coming out sometime tomorrow (finally!  I know, i know… )

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