I changed my Twitter background. It’s a photo I took of the Saco Heath Preserve in the summer of 2007.

The Twitter background of @brentdanley

I tried many times to get a screenshot without any protected tweets. When I saw this I grabbed it quickly.

I use dimensions of 1600 pixels wide and a sidebar of 250 pixels wide. I then fade the right and bottom of the picture to a solid color and set the background to that color, for those people with large and wide-screen monitors.

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Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Tonight I installed Ubuntu 9.10. The process was wicked simple. I burned the image to a disk and rebooted my machine. I verified the language and location and told it to use the entire hard disk and in a few minutes it was installed.

Configuring the wireless card was a breeze. It automatically recognized Kirsten’s Windows XP box so I could access her files. I got all the updates downloaded and installed. I’m currently listening to mp3s in Rythmbox and editing a screenshot in GIMP. Bliss.

Tomorrow I’ll set up the LAMP web server stack and configure dual-monitor support.

My new Ubuntu 9.10 computer

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Sometimes 140 characters just isn’t enough room to express our thoughts, activities, quotations, recipes, tutorials, diatribes, announcements, affections, tips and lessons. Our most valiant attempts at compendium often extend beyond the limitations imposed by Twitter. The solution is quite simple: all a tweeter has to do is include a URL to point to a blog post, photo or video.

But, what if the URL is too long?

This URL is 176 characters: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416594787/ref=s9_intb_gw_tr02?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1Q4Z3EN485H4KY6HXSVS&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846

URL shortening services have sprung up to satisfy the burgeoning need for shorter links. They accomplish this by storing lengthy URLs in a database table with a corresponding alias. When a user points to the shortened URL the longer link is fetched from the database and the user is automatically redirected.

While perusing tweets I noticed Justin Russell had posted a link using a short domain that looked close to his own name, http://jusr.us/. Upon inquiry he pointed me to an open source PHP URL shortener called Phurl.

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Tweeting is nice because it’s terse; I can update my tweeps about what I’m doing, resources I’ve discovered and articles I’ve read between more lengthy and media-rich blog posts (and to publicize those posts).

The Twitter Tools plugin is a great way to integrate tweets into a WordPress blog. The most obvious benefit of this is that it keeps the content on the blog page fresh and allows bloggers to communicate bitlets of information that do not require their own post.

In addition to other worthwhile features, Twitter Tools allows a blog admin to display recent tweets in a sidebar widget, and to automatically publish tweets in a daily or weekly digest format. Twitter Tools caches tweets in a table of the WordPress database to reduce the number of calls to Twitter.

There were a few things about the plugin I didn’t particularly like out of the box. First, there was a link below the last tweet in the sidebar widget to take a visitor to my Twitter page. I prefer to have the widget title be that link. Second, the digest post title date format was ugly: “2009-06-29″ instead of “June 29, 2009″. Third, the link at the end of each tweet in the digest post had a simple ‘#’ instead of the date and time of the tweet, which also serves as a link to the original tweet.

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How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live
Steven Johnson, Time, June 4, 2009

The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your “followers,” and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly?

Twitter certainly doesn’t make a good first impression. The magic of Twitter happens for people after they jettison the idea that Twitter is primarily about what people are doing. In fact, Twitter is about what people are reading, talking about, thinking about, experiencing and the people to whom they are talking and meeting. It is, in essence, a huge connected conversation.

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If you think the primary use for Twitter is to tell people what you’re doing, you really do not “get it”. It’s okay, neither did I for a very long time. :)

@brentdanley's tweet frequency

The “point” of Twitter is communication. It’s active and viral.

For example, let’s suppose I find a cool website/blog post/article and tweet it. Then, several of my followers like the tweet and decide to re-tweet it to their followers. The dissemination can be exponential. Anybody can follow me and I choose who I want to follow. It’s like being at a cocktail party with the world and being able to participate in any of the innumerable conversations.

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Sweeeeeeet tweeeeeeets!

Tweets ARE worth all of that excitement, Conan. ;)

I’d like to think some of my tweets are Tweet Treats.

I love how the Twitter bird gets destroyed over and over in the video.

Don’t crap on the app. Don’t spit on the twit. And, don’t flush Twitter down the …

Tonight Show Twitter TRACKER: Conan Does the Twitter [Video]
Adam Ostrow, Mashable, June 3, 2009

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Evan Williams, Ted Talks, Evan Williams on listening to Twitter users, February 2009

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Twitter. Tweet!

Thanks, @VCwroblewski. :)

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Twitter Power, Joel Comm, John Wiley & Sons, 2009

I opened my Twitter account on August 31, 2007. As you can see from the graph below, it took me a little while to appreciate the value of the Twitter phenomenon.

http://tweetstats.com/graphs/brentdanley

That first day I sent four tweets.

Reading Technology Review and configuring Netvibes
8:06 AM Aug 31st 2007 (more…)

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