Setting Up Twitter Tools
Posted by Mitch on Aug 24, 2010
As some of you know, I’ve been using the WordPress plugin Twitter Tools for almost a year. I found it to be a great program to set up how I wanted it to send my blog posts to Twitter, and it was the only plugin I could find at the time that would let me post-date my posts and still automatically go out.
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Then some of you saw my post a few days ago talking about twitter plugin changes that are on the way, that actually have been on the way for months but most of us hadn’t heard a lot about it. As it pertained to Twitter Tools at least, suddenly you had to go into Twitter and set yourself up as a developer, each individual blog, and get these codes for the program to continue working. I had written the WordPress people about it and they didn’t offer enough help for me to be able to get it right.
Well, if you paid attention to the comments on that post, you’ll see that my friend Chris, a super techie, offered instructions on how to get it done. Man, talk about nick of time type of stuff! However, it might be difficult following along with the comments. I’ve now done it 3 times for my 3 blogs; I can tell you what you need to do to get it done right.
First, go to your Twitter page, then go to Settings. Once in Settings go to Connections. After that, look to the right of the page where it says Developers, and click on the link at the end of that little paragraph. You might not have anything on this next page, but you’ll see a link at the bottom left that says “Register a new application ยป”; click on that.
Now you’re on the page where you’ll register your blog as a new application. By the way, I’m not sure if you’ll have other plugins you use with Twitter than you’ll have to do the same thing for, but for Twitter Tools, this is definitely how you go about it all.
The first thing is asks for is an image; you don’t have to do this ever, since you’re the only one who’s going to see it, but you can if you want.
Next it says Application Name. This should be the name of your blog, but it can be anything. With one of my blogs it said someone was already using the name, so I had to modify it slightly.
Next is the Description box. Just write something short and sweet in there on what your blog is about.
Next is Application Website; type the entire URL of your website in there, including the “http://” part.
Next is Organization; I left this empty.
Next is Website; type the entire URL of your website in there, including the “http://” part.
Next is Application Type, and it should be defaulted to “Browser”; if not, that what you want to select.
Next is Callback URL; type the entire URL of your website in there, including the “http://” part.
Next is Default Application Type; this one is important because it’s defaulted to “read only”, and you want “read and write” instead.
Next, you want to check the box next to “Use Twitter for Login“.
Finally the captcha; get it right, although it will let you do it again if you get it wrong; I hate those things!
Once you hit save, if it’s acceptable you’ll see a message telling you so. You’ll be on a new page, and you’ll have your first bit of information to put into your Twitter Tools settings on your blog. If you’ve updated it, open it up under Settings in your control panel on your blog. Once you have it open, you’ll see it asks you for a Consumer Key and a Consumer Secret. Both of those are on the Twitter page you’ve just been taken do. It’s best to copy and paste it in so you don’t mess it up.
After that, you’ll see you need information to fill in for Access Token and Access Token Secret. To get that, you go to this link, http://dev.twitter.com/apps and it will take you to a page where you’ll see the “application” you just registered, which will be your website. Click on it and you’ll go to another page where you’ll see a list of items to the right. Click on the one that says My Access Token and it’ll take you to the page with the information you need for the two items above.
Once you’ve put that in click Save, and if the plugin says it connected to Twitter you’re done with all the hard stuff, and just need to customize your settings based on what you want to do.
And there you go; whew! It turns out to look a lot more difficult than it really was. And I can’t think Chris enough for the help; you da man!
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Firefox, I Love Ya But…
Posted by Mitch on Aug 9, 2010
Firefox and I have always had a love – less love kind of relationship. I left Netscape for Firefox and I never looked back; I often thought that maybe I killed Netscape (no, we all know who killed it), but it didn’t matter. Firefox was better than IE, and that’s all that used to matter.
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There are just so many things to love about Firefox. I love the add-ons. I love how I can change the look. I love how I can go into the config.about settings and change stuff if I really want to (don’t do this unless you know what you’re doing). I love how it’s just a bit more protection than IE. I love the tabs. Frankly, there’s not much I don’t like about it.
And yet, there is something I don’t like, something that’s irked me for years, the one thing that I just can’t overcome. Sometimes Firefox hangs, and when it does, that’s it. By hangs, I mean that it just suddenly stops. You can’t do anything because it’s pretty much said it’s had enough. You can’t even go into the task manager and turn it off; I mean, how many programs do that?
I have researched this issue for years and tried to find a workaround. It was suggested to remove Zone Alarm because they don’t play well together; I tried that. It was suggested that maybe it was AVG; I tried that. It was suggested to change your profile; I tried that. Nothing has worked. There have been some suggestions that I don’t have the technical knowledge for, so those I haven’t tried. However, my thought is that someone at Mozilla, the group that makes Firefox, would have addressed the issue at some point.
You know what? Never. Now, that’s a strange one, isn’t it? Through all the forums they have, with this issue coming up often enough, not a single Mozilla person has ever chimed in with a fix. They won’t even acknowledge that there’s a problem; isn’t that weird? I mean, even Microsoft eventually came clean on the dog that is Vista (which I’m still stuck on). And folks, it’s not Vista that’s hanging Firefox, because I had the same issue under XP.
So, I’m stuck. I’m not crazy about Opera, even though it’s never hung on my system, and I’m not a major fan of Chrome. Don’t even try to talk me into, what, IE 8 or 9 now? I guess I’m stuck in “bootup loop” city, and I’m not overly happy about it. There just has to be a solution, right? Someone? Anyone?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Thunderbird 3; I’m Not Impressed
Posted by Mitch on Jun 8, 2010
Suffice it to say I’ve always loved Thunderbird by Mozilla. I loved it from the first time I saw it, probably mainly because it wasn’t Outlook. I know other folks loved Eudora, but it just wasn’t for me. I found Thunderbird gave me everything I wanted and more, and was happy.
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Then came this latest version, and I find myself less than impressed. Thunderbird 3, which is now 3.0.4, has made some significant changes, which they say make it easier for new users, and offers some features they’ve never had before. But they’ve also messed up some interfaces, and if you ask me, there’s only been one good consequence from it.
First, they set up the default so it looks like Outlook; what’s that about? The idea behind Mozilla was that it was the anti-Outlook; if I’d wanted Outlook I would be using it. Maybe that’s the “easy” part for new users, using something they’re familiar with.
Second, they changed how you could save email addresses. Instead of opening up one of those Properties menus so you could add information and put it in any special mail category you’d created, now when you click to save the email address and you get the edit form you can add information, but you can’t place it anywhere special. Everything goes into a personal address book, and you have to open your contacts and move it to where you want it after the fact.
Third, let’s talk about the Contacts for a bit. That wasn’t even included as a default in the toolbar, and now that I’m calling it Contacts, let me back up for a minute. When I added it to the general program toolbar it was called Address Book. When you’re in an email you’re writing it’s called Contacts. And I had to add both; that was irritating. Sure, it will remember email addresses you already have if you just start typing it in, but if you’re doing multiple emails, and you want to BCC them, then typing each address individually can take up a lot of time.
Something they changed, which is why they didn’t put it on the toolbar automatically, was putting those tabs onto the email you happen to be reading. That’s not so bad if you want to keep all your email at the normal size it defaults to. I’m one of those people who likes opening emails to the full size of my browser so that I not only can read it easier by making it larger, but that way I only see one email at a time so that I’ll focus on that one email. Thing is, when you open an email all the way, those tabs aren’t always there. Oh, some are, but not all of them all the time. I find myself every time having to open it up, close it back, then open it again to get all those tabs back. If they’d just left it alone in the toolbar I wouldn’t have had to deal with it.
What did they add that they consider something good? They added a search bar which will search through your email to find something. When you do it a new tab opens in the program, something like if you click on some links in Firefox, and it will give you lists of where that word appears throughout the program. To the right it’ll give you 10 choices in a particular folder, then More will be there so you can click it to get 10 more. It’s actually kind of freaky; I like to have a better way of doing it.
And that leads to my one very good thing. It works much better with Google Desktop, which y’all know I love. Now when I download new email, it instantly indexes it, so that I can immediately find that email. Yeah, I know you’re saying who’d have a need to find something that fast. Well, I have 9 different inboxes set up in Thunderbird, so sometimes I’m not sure where an email actually went.
Now, the Mozilla folks are smart, so I figure in the next update, whenever it comes, they’ll have addressed at least a couple of my issues. When that happens, I know I’ll be a happy camper once more. For now, though, I’d have to say that I’m less than impressed with Thunderbird 3, yet it still beats Outlook by a mile.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Two Free Programs, Two Great Chess Sites
Posted by Mitch on May 27, 2010
As the title says, today I’m going to introduce two free programs you might not know about, and then talk about two free chess sites that those of you who like playing chess might enjoy, and I’ll have something else for you at the end.
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The first is a free PDF program called doPDF. Obviously what it lets you do is print pdf files from any program on your computer. I’d been looking for one of these for a long time, because the one I had was free as long as you wanted to look at an ad every time you created a pdf. That wouldn’t have been so bad, except it opened up IE every single time, and if I was creating a bunch of pdfs, or needed to make corrections on one, that just got tiring after awhile. Anyway, there are no frills with the program, but at least it lets you save your pdf wherever you want to.
The next program is something from a company called Brothersoft. The program is called Convert MP4 to MP3. Plain and simple, that’s also what it does. Once again this was something I’d been looking for. Through a script from Greasemonkey, which you can use with Firefox, I can actually download movies in an MP4 format from YouTube. However, many times I’m downloading the video because I really want the song, and I’d been wanting to add those songs to my music database. So I found this program, totally freeware, and you can convert multiple files at a time. Works very fast as well, and since the download from YouTube is the highest quality download, what you end up getting after the conversion is high quality as well. That is, as long as the original version was high quality to begin with.
Done with programs; now onto chess. It’s one of the few games I play online, probably because it’s not something that you have to sit down and play live with someone, although there are sites that do that. For both of these sites, you get to make your move, then go about your life until you get an email notification that there’s been a move in a game you’re playing. I love that.
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The first site I’m going to mention is called Scheming Mind, and it’s a site created by a friend of mine named Austin Lockwood; I’m not quite sure where he’s from, but the site is located somewhere in Europe. Anyway, it’s a free chess site as long as you play fewer than 10 games at a time. If you want to play unlimited games, it’s only $20 a year, and trust me he’s not getting rich off the site.
Sire and I play here, and I think it works for us because not only can we talk during the games, but every message we write is saved so we can go back and read them again, or address them after a move so we can take some time to think about things. The site also offers multiple types of games and different speeds of games, so that you can have as many as 30 days for each player to make a single move or as few as 5 days. You can join tournaments, though if you’re playing for free you can only join one tournament at a time. You can also ask the site to suggest a player based on ranking criteria, then select someone who they suggest or ask for more suggestions. However, sometimes it’s a hit or miss as to whether you’ll be playing that game, since people can reject you. Overall I love the site.
The other chess site is called Net-Chess, and I like this site as well, but for a different reason. With this site you can play as many games as you want to, but you’ll also find that it can be overwhelming if you’re not paying attention to how you’re joining the games. Every game you get into is some kind of mini tournament. You can decide how many games you’re going to play against each opponent if you create the tournament, or you can join a tournament that fits your ranking; you’ll establish a real ranking after you’ve played so many games.
The overwhelming part is that you might not be paying attention and suddenly find yourself playing upwards of 40 or more games at one time. True, you get to make each individual move at your leisure, but for some folks, like myself, that’s a few too many games at once. I like to have 20 going when I can, mainly because some people won’t ever start the games every though they signed up, and some people will forget, being overwhelmed, and they’ll lose on time. As long as they’ve made 10 moves in the game, if they time out you automatically get both the win and the points, and points are given based on your rank and the rank of your opponent at the time.
There are the two free programs and the two chess sites. The final thing is a little motivational thing from a blog friend named Marelisa, whom I’ve mentioned thrice before, once within a post on great posts, once highlighting her blog on Blog Day 2009, and later on a post on creativity. Anyway she’s got another great post, short by her standards, titled 525+ Bucket List Ideas, somewhat based on the movie The Bucket List. Yeah, that’s pretty comprehensive, but that’s kind of her point, that there are limitless opportunities for all of us to find within ourselves to try if we’re predisposed to do it.
There you go; don’t ever say I don’t provide any value to anyone! lol
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Accessing Folders In Vista And Windows; My Palm Story
Posted by Mitch on May 25, 2010
Vista is trouble, Adobe is da bomb; let’s just get that out of the way.
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Some of you may remember when I was lamenting that my Palm had gone on the fritz months earlier and how I wanted to get something that would work the same way, but not only could I not find anything else that worked like a Palm (stupid smartphones), but there was a problem with Palm the company falling apart; I think they’ve finally found a buyer, though I have no idea what that means for the company overall.
Anyway, I ended up buying a Palm, the same as I have now, on eBay, had it break 10 days later, sent it back for repairs, got it back, and I feel like my world is fairly complete once again. That “fairly” is because I still had one overriding issue that was messing me up and driving me crazy; keep my first line in your mind because we’ll be back to that.
I’ve always had Adobe Reader for Palm, which is great because I get tons of PDF files and no time to read them, and it’s great being able to put them on the Palm for those times when I have long periods away from the computer, like on an airplane. Well, for whatever reason, it wouldn’t load onto the new Palm. It was freaking me out. For almost a month I kept trying to load it here and there, and it just wasn’t having it. It wouldn’t load when I first had the Palm either, but I thought after it broke that maybe there was a problem with the software.
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As I said, I kept trying to get it to load, but it wasn’t having it. I would reset the Palm; nothing. I would load and unload this program called Hotsync, which is how you sync a Palm to a computer; nothing. I would download the program time after time, even though it was the same program, and I thought that one day it would just magically work; nothing. The program was on the computer just fine, with PDFs ready to load and others already on my Palm; what the hey?
Last Thursday, it finally hit me as to what the answer could possibly be, and this is where stupid Vista comes back into play, and actually Windows 7 follows this rule, but I don’t have that so I’m not going to call it stupid; yet anyway. One thing most of us who have ended up with this operating system learned is that Vista put files in a different place than where they resided on XP. I did a quick search for the file I was trying to load onto the program, knowing the extension was “.prc”, and I found it.
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What I needed to know was what folder it was in, and I found it buried deep in a User file under my name, under Documents for some reason, then under Palm and finally in a folder called Installations. I looked at the properties for the folder, and I saw that it was set to “read only”.
I clicked that off, figuring that was the entire problem, and tried again; nope. But I knew I was on to something. I went into the properties again, this time to all the “users”. Under Security, they were me, Admin, and System; go figure, but that’s what was there. There were shaded out checkmarks for each name, which meant I couldn’t do anything with them, but thought the checkmarks meant that it was already set for me to use that folder. However, it wasn’t working. So I decided to click on Edit, which opened another menu, and then clicked on Add. The name “Everyone” came up, and I selected that. I gave that name approval to do everything in the folder, saved it, and closed every menu.
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I went to sync the Palm, and everything worked perfectly. I’m a happy guy once more, with my PDF files and the like on my Palm, and I’m feeling pretty smart about it all. What made me think about it? I remembered my wife’s computer, which is on Windows 7, and when I was trying to load Mailwasher onto it. For some reason, it wouldn’t let me activate it, and I tried at least once a day for a week. That is, after the two week period that it lets one run the program before it decides it’s not going to play any longer until you update. I couldn’t get it to load, so I went online to see if anyone else had the problem previously, they had, and they talked about doing what I did as a potential fix, and afterwards it worked perfectly.
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See, Vista and Windows 7 have put in a lot of protections up front to keep people who don’t know what they’re doing from messing things up. That’s why most people can’t see the extension on their files, which is moronic because that makes people click on some of the stupidest stuff, not knowing it’s not a program file, and that will mess up some computers here and there as well. The area I was in is one that’s not critical to the operation of a computer, and thus it makes no sense for it to have the same kind of security as every other folder. But I guess that would have been too complicated for Microsoft to do for us; sigh.
Anyway, if you find yourself trying to install something, or get something working that doesn’t seem to have any other fault, this is something you can think of trying out.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Zone Alarm Issues You Should Know About
Posted by Mitch on May 13, 2010
I’ve always liked Zone Alarm a lot. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this, it’s a firewall program, free or paid, that blocks signals from activating nasty things on your computer, as well as hides your ports. It also prevents programs that get onto your computer that you don’t know about from loading without your knowledge. I mentioned it in my post on Best Free Software almost a full year ago, along with Comodo, another free firewall program.
I hadn’t been able to use it ever since I got this computer last December because the computer was 64-bit, and Zone Alarm hadn’t decided if they were going to go that route. Lo and behold Windows 7 came out, was 64-bit, and Zone Alarm, knowing it was coming, saw the writing on the wall and came along into the future. Still, I didn’t immediately load it. I decided to add it two weeks ago when, for whatever reason, Comodo, which I’d been using, stopped updating itself. I went to the forums, and it seems the only thing I could do was unload it and load the updated version. I decided if I had to unload it I might as well pop Zone Alarm
on.
I loaded Zone Alarm and it was a snap. I saw that they had added some goofy toolbar, and I’m not one of those people who likes adding all those stupid toolbars from all these programs so I told it I didn’t want it. Unfortunately, it seems that if you tell the program you don’t want it that it loads it anyway, just doesn’t show it. I didn’t know that at the time, and only learned about it this week.
Why did I learn about it this week? For whatever reason my Palm suddenly wouldn’t sync with the computer. Also, Firefox started acting really goofy as well. At times it would suddenly stop working, and when I closed it, seems it wouldn’t fully close. Then I would try to reboot the computer and that wasn’t happening either. I was getting this message saying “forcefield.exe” was preventing the shutdown.
Forcefield? You know I started wondering which alien
force had invaded my computer, or whether there were some superheroes
battling bad guys. I finally looked it up and it seems that’s the program Zone Alarm loads onto your computer as the toolbar. And, for whatever reason, it messes things up drastically. I went into “msconfig” and told it not to load anymore, yet when I rebooted, there it was again. I finally thought to check my Programs area in control panel, and there it was, all the way at the bottom. I uninstalled that, and things have been great ever since. My main concern was that Zone Alarm would still work, and it seems to be working just fine.
Since I’ve recommended the program I figure it’s time to remind you of the underline. If you see a blue underline, that means it’s a link to a product. Zone Alarm is free as a firewall, but you can also purchase the product as it also has an antivirus and anti-spyware program that’s part of the paid product. And, of course, there are some other products; gotta take advantage of those special words here and there, right?
Firefox 3.6; Now That’s What I’m Talking About!
Posted by Mitch on Mar 16, 2010
On Friday I got my first alert that there was an upgrade to the Firefox browser. It also said it wasn’t compatible with one of the add-ons that I liked, and I thought about not upgrading to it. However, Saturday night it popped up again, and I decided okay, fine, I’ll go that route. After all, one add-on does not a perfect browser make, right?
Let me say this; you’ve got to upgrade to Firefox 3.6, and you have to do it now! Man, this sucker is fast; I mean, I haven’t found a page yet that I’d have to wait longer than a second to get to, and that’s just phenomenal. I’m not going to get into all the technical stuff, mainly because I don’t understand it all either, but the main thing they did to improve speed was to address the issue of javascript performance. I’ve written here in the dark past how javascript issues can slow down a blog. Seems they can also slow down some browsers, and they’ve overcome that issue.
They also did something where the scripts will all run asynchronously, or independently from each other, which is what slows things down often. You know how you visit some blogs and you’ll notice something hanging, which is preventing your page to fully load for awhile? That’s not supposed to happen with Firefox 3.6, and so far in my own little tests it seems to be working great.
They’ve also added something new, which will probably pretty much get rid of themes. Instead of themes, now you can add a “persona”, of which they have more than 30,000. This bad boy changes the look of your browser to whatever you want, and I have to tell you, I’ve changed mine to some pretty bright colors, and just looking at it is making me smile because it’s always been dark since I bought the new computer, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
Firefox 3.6 will also now tell you if your plugins are out of date, rather than waiting until you get to a site and suddenly realize you can’t access something. I like that as well, and of course you always have the option to tell it to leave you alone for awhile.
I have to say that I feel they did a great job with this new version. Everything is easier to see, and I’m not even missing the one add-on that’s not compatible anymore, the AnyColor add-on, because what they’ve done is made the print on your open tabs bigger and easier to see, and the transparency also makes it easier to read, so you know exactly what each tab is. And obviously you don’t need it with the persona’s option.
The only minor gripe I have thus far is that, for some reason, every once in awhile instead of opening up a new tab it opens up a brand new window. There was that same issue with Firefox 3.5 initially, something they called tab tearing, and they quickly came up with a bug fix for it. I’m hoping they’ll do the same with this browser.
If you’re not using Firefox, well, I’m not sure why, but trust me, you’ll love this new version of Firefox whether you use it now or not.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
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