NancyM's Tumblelog

Twitter Lists

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 23:07:00 +0100

My friend Duncan Hart recently tweeted:

@nm could you write & share a ‘how to’ best use @twitter #lists ?
— Duncan Hart (@duncanhart)
April 21, 2013

Thanks for inspiring me to write about this Duncan! I’ll describe how and why I use Twitter lists, but my guess is that my way of using Twitter lists is not going to inspire many others to start using them.

Twitter Lists Overview

Twitter lets each user create 20 lists, each of which can follow 500 accounts. I have 2 private lists and 18 public lists. You might be able to see a list of my public lists at one or both of these URLs:

I say might because Twitter keeps changing these URLs and their viewability. At the moment, you need to be logged in to Twitter to view these pages, but they used to be viewable by everyone, whether they were logged in or not. If you know the URL of a public list, you can view it whether you’re logged in to Twitter or not. Here’s one of my public lists:

twitter.com/nm/fun

On the list’s page, you can see the rest of my public lists by looking in the sidebar in a section called More lists.

How I Use Twitter Lists

The main way that I use Twitter lists is by having a private list, which I check on many times a day. This list includes:

apps I use, such as the Opera web browser
services I use, such as DreamHost and FastMail.FM
people I have a crush on, such as James Franco
people I know in real life, including family,friends, kids, and romantic interests
things I really care about, such as privacy and security
guilty pleasures

The reason I make this list private is because I don’t want to be profiled, I don’t want my crushes to know I have a crush on them, I don’t want the kids I know to be any more public than they already are, and I want to keep my private life private.

I’m not going to publish the real name of this private list, but in order to write about it more easily, I’ll call it Secret and have its URL be http://twitter.com/nm/Secret. I have this URL set up as the “Home” page in my web browsers and whenever I’m bored I click the browser’s Home icon and see what’s up with the people, companies, and topics I care about most. Once I’m viewing my Secret list, I can easily get to another one of my lists from the More lists section of the sidebar. For example, during the Boston Marathon crisis, I regularly looked at:

twitter.com/nm/gov-law-news-politics

And during the financial crisis, I regularly looked at:

twitter.com/nm/business-economics-money

And when I’m trying to get inspired to write, I look at:

twitter.com/nm/words

Why I Use Twitter Lists

There are a lot of reasons I like Twitter lists, including:

There are no ads in Twitter lists.
You can read public Twitter lists when you’re not logged in to Twitter, e.g. when you’re at an Internet café, and Twitter has no idea who you are and thus can’t track and profile you.
You can get around Twitter’s follow limits by following accounts in either your main timeline or in your, or other people’s, lists.
If you follow someone in a list, and not in your main timeline, they can’t direct message you.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, I don’t think this will inspire many people to start using Twitter lists, but I hope it helps you understand why I use them

Maybe If I Learn Markdown I'll Blog More

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 22:03:00 +0000

It’s been more than three years since I was regularly updating my web sites. Part of the reason for this silence is that I’ve moved about 10 times, including between countries, but the main reason is that I’ve been in search of new tools. I think, maybe, I’ve found a key tool for the next incarnation of my web presence: Markdown markup language.

My History Of Web Publishing

For years I’ve used vim, Dreamweaver, sftp, and ssh to write & update web pages. From 2003 to 2010 I also blogged¹ using Blogger, vim, and Windows Live Writer. That system was OK, but editing the Blogger template was torture. I stuck with Blogger because² I could use my own domain and because I could set up Blogger to automatically ftp my blog posts to my own web-hosting provider. When Google announced that they were turning off Blogger’s ftp-publishing capability, I quit using Blogger. I’ve been trying to figure out a new system for publishing on the web since then. I keep thinking Tumblr might be it, but I don’t like using Tumblr’s “rich text editor” or their “plain text/HTML” editor, and I haven’t found a good app that works with Tumblr and works on all the platforms that I use. I like WL Writer, but it doesn’t work with Tumblr, it’s not cross-platform, and it seems to be abandonware.

My Discovery Of Markdown

A couple weeks ago I signed up for meta.discourse.org, posted some comments³, and discovered the joy of Markdown. Discourse⁴ uses a rich text editor that automatically displays both a WYSIWYG and a Markdown view of your post while you’re composing it. This was a revelation to me because I never realized how easy & elegant Markdown is. I’ve known about it for years, but never felt compelled to learn it, probably because I wanted the control that I get when I directly edit HTML.

Learning Markdown

Here are some of the pages I used to learn Markdown:

Here are the searches I did to find the above, and lots more, pages about Markdown and MultiMarkdown⁵, which is the version of Markdown that Tumblr uses:

I Think I ♥ Markdown

This post is my first time tumblelogging in Markdown and I’m optimistic that I will indeed post more now that I have a pleasant (maybe even fun!) way to create HTML.

And now the footnotes⁶ …

My old blog is titled Deflexion.com: deflexion & reflexion from nancy mcgough. ↩
Another reason I stuck with Blogger was because I trusted @ev, thanks to his Evhead blog, which used to be one of my regular reads. ↩
I’m @n_m on meta.discourse.org. If you care about the future of online discussion groups, I recommend you join me in the meta Discourse discussions. ↩
Discourse is FLOSS forum software created by Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) and others. I’ve read Jeff’s Coding Horror blog for years. ↩
Actually, the version of Markdown used at Tumblr is a superset of MultiMarkdown. ↩
I’m a big fan of footnotes and I already ♥ MultiMarkdown’s footnoting feature! ↩

Reasons I Won't Join Pheed

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 17:00:00 +0100

Pheed is all over my Twitter feeds this morning and I considered joining, but decided not to because:

They autopost to Twitter, without giving the option to opt out.
They ask for your full birth date (day, month, year) and I refuse to join any social network that asks for this identifying info (that’s why I’m not on Facebook). I don’t mind if my human audience knows who I really am, but I don’t want companies, robots, governments, and other snoops to be able to easily track, identify, and profile me.
The username must be a “Minimum 3 characters, must start with a letter. You can use letters, numbers, underscores, hyphens and one dot (.).” This means that I can’t use nm as my Pheed username, which is what I use on Twitter and on Identi.ca. It also means that no one with a 1- or 2-character Twitter username will be able to get that username on Pheed and, if they are like me, won’t join.

They’ve just exploded onto the scene, so bravo to their marketers, but I predict they won’t last long. For more info, see:

TracFone

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 22:57:00 +0100

I’ve been using TracFone prepaid phones for a few years and whenever I need to add minutes, I look at the following two pages by the Prepaid Phone Guy (also known as pbushx2):

Prepaid Phone Guy (his current blog)
TracFone Promo Codes (a page on his old blog that he keeps up to date with the latest promotional codes)

I first read his blog to find out his latest thoughts on prepaid phones and to be sure he’s still updating his TracFone Promo Codes page. Note that some of the promo codes won’t work for everyone, e.g. a promo code might be a birthday promo and will work only if it’s near your birthday (and TracFone knows what your birthday is). If a promo code doesn’t work, you’ll get a text message that says:

Please contact our Customer Care Center at 1-800-867-7183 to complete this transaction

I recommend not calling their Customer Care Center because when I did, it used about 30 minutes of my phone’s time (~$1.80) and I ended up not getting any promo minutes.

I also like to see what’s new on TracFone’s pages:

If I really want to get up to date on the mobile phone world, I look at these pages:

If you want to get a TracFone, I recommend that you get a Triple-Minutes-For-Life phone, get a 450-minute (or more) card, and use a promo code. This will make phone calls less than 6¢ per minute and text messages less than 2¢ per short message.

What prepaid phone plans do you like? What web sites do you trust for mobile phone info?

Separate or combine my blog & reblog?

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 00:01:00 +0100

[1st posted 2012-Aug-13; updated 2012-Aug-21]

When I Iook at tumblr.com/account/manage, I see:

nancym.tumblr.com
Created 4 years ago; 3,563 posts, 179 followers.

Most of my Tumblr posts are not by me, but instead were reblogged from other tumblelogs. I’d like to start publicly writing again and I’m wondering if I should use nancym.tumblr.com or a separate blog for my own writing. For now, I’m experimenting with combining my blogging and reblogging. I’ll tag posts that are created by me with the tag ByNM, which will make them findable with the following links:

nancym.tumblr.com/tagged/bynm
nancym.tumblr.com/tagged/bynm/rss
tumblr.com/tagged/bynm
twitter.com/search/?q=%23ByNM (%23 is the percent-encoding for #)
identi.ca/tag/ByNM

This will work only if I remember to tweet & dent about my posts, and use the ByNM tag.

What do you think? Would you prefer I separate my blog and reblog, or jumble them into one everything blog? Do you have any thoughts about using a ByNM tag for my posts?