Monthly Archives: December 2009

Explore the Twitterverse with Mentionmap

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I’ve just stumbled across a neat little web application which allows you to visually explore your Twitter network. It allows you to discover which people interact the most and what they’re talking about, as well as traverse the Twitter-verse and finds links to people you might otherwise not have found. Think “six degrees of separation” for your Twitter followers.

The visualization runs right in your browser and displays data from the Twitter API.  According to the maker, Asterisq, it works like this:

Mentionmap loads each user’s Twitter status updates (tweets) and finds the people and hashtags they talked about the most. The data is displayed using Constellation Framework, a graph visualization library for Actionscript.

In this data visualization, mentions become connections and discussions between multiple users emerge as clusters.

Clicking a user will display their network of mentions as well as details from their profile. You can also search for friends by typing their Twitter user-names into the search box.

Mentionmap - A Twitter Visualization

I think this visualization is really neat, and I’d really recommend you check it out and have a play.  I found it very interesting to see the relationships between the people I primarily converse with on Twitter.

MagicPrefs – Making the Magic Mouse Even More Magical

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500x_magicprefs
MagicPrefs is a free menubar application which aims to improve the functionality and configuration options of the Apple Magic Mouse.

  • It features the ability to bind a variable number of finger clicks, taps, swipes, pinch and other gestures to functions like Middle Click , Hold Down Both Mouse Buttons , Spaces , Expose, Dashboard etc.
  • Touch Sensitivity implements a single point control for a number of factors impacting the algorithms of the taps, swipes, pinche and other gestures.
  • Tracking Speed adds the ability to increase the maximum mouse speed by a extra 200%.
  • Also featured is a real-time display of the fingers touching the surface of the mouse that you can enable to test

You can download it, here for free.

(Via Gizmodo)

10 Absolute *must have* WordPress Plugins

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Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

3

Google Sitemap Generator

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

2

Echo

Echo is the next generation commenting system. It’s the way to share your content, and watch the live reaction. You can quickly embed Echo on WordPress, Blogger, or any website and turn your static pages into a real-time stream of diggs, tweets, comments and more.  It’s not free, but it *is* cheap and worth every dollar.

echo

WordPress Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

12

Easy AdSense

Easy AdSense provides a very easy way to generate revenue from your blog using Google AdSense. With its full set of features, Easy AdSense is perhaps the first plugin to give you a complete solution for everything AdSense-related.

11

Google Analytics for WordPress

The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. It also allows you to track AdSense clicks, add extra search engines, track image search queries and it will even work together with Urchin.

10

Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button

Help readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, and over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites. The button comes with AddToAny’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing history.

6

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.

17

Broken Link Checker

This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found.

14

FD Feedburner Plugin

The Feedburner Plugin redirects the main feed and optionally the comments feed to Feedburner.com. It does this seamlessly without the need to modify templates, setup new hidden feeds, modify .htaccess files, or asking users to migrate to a new feed. All existing feeds simply become Feedburner feeds seamlessly and transparently for all users. Just tell the plugin what your Feedburner feed URL is and you’re done.

If you used blogger, you no doubt integrated your feed with Feedburner, seeing as Google bought it and integrated it, as it adds some wonderful
functionality to your feed with the ‘Add to Del-ici-ous… Digg… Email…. Technorati’ etc, but also its AUTOMATIC pinging to different news services, and sites to tell them you have new content. It also splices in flickr, del-ici-ous or furl, it adds Google Adsense to your posts and so much more. So you will more than likely want to keep this and so it lets you redirect your wordpress feed to your own unique wordpress feed, therefore keeping the AUTOMATED updates and subscribers are none the wiser it is coming from a different blogging platform.

Just need to go into feedburner configuration under appearance to set the feeds and redirects (took me a while to find it, prob should have read
installation. ;o)

The Ultimate Mac Keyboard Shortcut List

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I have found possibly the best site on the Internet:

I like to figure out the fastest way to do things. I hope these shortcuts will help you become the power user that lies within. These keystrokes should work on Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard and 10.5 Leopard (many also work on 10.4 Tiger). I add new shortcuts as I find them, so check back! I’m still exploring Snow Leopard and will be updating this page as I discover new goodies.

Please note that Cmd is short for the Command key (otherwise called the Apple key).

Guide to the Mac’s Menu Symbol:

Symbol
 Key on Keyboard
Symbol
 Key on Keyboard
Command/Apple key (like Control on a PC)
Delete
Option (like Alt on a PC)
Escape
Shift
Page Up
Control (Control-click = Right-click)
Page Down
Tab
Home
Return
End
Enter (on Number Pad)
Arrow Keys

Finder Shortcuts

Action Keystroke
Open Sidebar item in a new window Cmd-Click it
Switch Finder views (Icon, List, Column, Cover Flow) Cmd-1, Cmd-2, Cmd-3, Cmd-4
In List view, expand a folder Right Arrow
In List view, collapse a folder Left Arrow
Rename the selected file/folder Press Return (or Enter)
Go into selected folder or open the selected file Cmd-Down Arrow
Go to parent folder Cmd-Up Arrow
Go Back Cmd-[  (that’s left square bracket)
Go Forward Cmd-]  (that’s right square bracket)
Select the next icon in Icon and List views Tab (Shift-Tab reverses direction)
Alternate columns in Column View Tab (Shift-Tab reverses direction)
Instantly show long file name (for names condensed with a “…”) Hold Option while mousing over long filenames
Resize current column to fit the longest file name Double-Click column resize widget
Resize all columns to fit their longest file names Option Double-Click resize widget
Copy and Paste files Cmd-C, then Cmd-V
Move a file instead of copying. (Copies the file to the destination and removes it from the original disk.) Cmd-Drag file to disk
Move selected files to the Trash Cmd-Delete
Empty the Trash (with warning) Cmd-Shift-Delete
Empty the Trash (without warning) Cmd-Opt-Shift-Delete
Cancel a drag-n-drop action while in the midst of dragging Esc
Show Inspector (a single, live refreshing Info window) Cmd-Opt-I
Undo the last action (such as rename file, copy file, etc.) Cmd-Z
Hide/Show Sidebar (on the left) Cmd-Opt-T
Move or Remove item in toolbar (at the top of the window).

This works in most programs.

 Cmd-drag
Open Quick Look (Mac OS 10.5) With file selected, tap Spacebar (or Cmd-Y)
Zoom In/Out on a Quick Look Preview Cmd-Plus(+) or Cmd-Minus(-)
Find by File Name (Mac OS 10.5) Cmd-Shift-F

 

Stefana Broadbent’s TEDTalk about Social Intimacy Through Social Media

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Stefana Broadbent’s TEDTalk about how social media is enhancing personal intimacy and personal sphere’s penetrating the workplace.

“research [that] shows how communication tech is capable of cultivating deeper relationships, bringing love across barriers like distance and workplace rules”

Windows 7 Freezes During Network File Copying

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My workstation at work is a great little computer. It’s running Windows 7 and its very reliable and does what I need it to do. However, periodically, usually during periods of large quanities of network traffic, it will freeze. No BSOD, no warning, just frozen.

After some googling, it seems that the on-board Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet adpater on the ASUS motherboard has a known issue with Windows Vista, and apparently Windows 7 as well:

Install a new driver The problem may be especially prominent with the Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet 10/100/1000Base-T Controller used on ASUS p5k motherboards. This driver (FTP Link), intended for Windows Vista, has been reported to solve this issue under Windows 7 in a variety of cases.

I downloaded the driver from here, and installed it on top of the generic Windows driver for the NIC and not a single freeze or lock-up since.

If you have an ASUS P5K series motherboard, I highly recommend that you upgrade this driver (even if you’re not having these problems as the performance seems better on these drivers).

Text Rotation with CSS

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Thankfully, many of the popular browsers of today support the ability to rotate HTML elements. Even better? Wed can make it work in Internet Explorer (back to version 5.5 even).  For Webkit and Firefox (as of 3.5), you can take advantage of the proposed transform property to handle the rotation. Each browser requires its property prefix for now.

-webkit-transform: rotate(-90deg);
-moz-transform: rotate(-90deg);

In order to perform a transformation, the element has to be set to display:block. In this case, just add the declaration to the span that you want to rotate.

When it comes to effects in Internet Explorer, there is a surprising amount of power (and untapped at that, I’d say) in using filters. Although misleading, there is a filter called BasicImage that offers up the ability to rotate any element that has layout.

filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(rotation=3);

The rotation property of the BasicImage filter can accept one of four values: 0, 1, 2, or 3 which will rotate the element 0, 90, 180 or 270 degress respectively.