Recently in twitter Category

Yes. I am a tshirt fan.
I won't apologise.
Kudos to Niall for finding this one:

I have odd ideas during the middle of the night...

The other night while chatting with a couple of people about social media "experts" and other snake oil types I went checking domains ... SocialMediaExpert.ie was available (as were a few other extensions), so I grabbed it.

James from Forbairt Media did a wonderful job on the design and layout (if you don't like it blame my taste, not his skills!)

And the first couple of posts went up yesterday.

What's it all about?

My first post explains some of it

The Irish Green Party have now deleted the tweet I mentioned the other day:

"Eamon Ryan will be on Morning Ireland to discuss, amongst other things, the Bill Cullen tweet. It's gone now, as the tone was inappropriate." (source Twitter)

If it was inappropriate and you recognise it as such, why was it put out there in the first place?

Or is it more a case of throwing inane comments out into cyberspace in the hope that nobody will call you on them?

And of course the tweet isn't "gone", as you can easily find it via twitter search:



Expect much fumbling vagueness from Eamon Ryan on RTE's Morning Ireland. Or maybe they'll actually surprise us all?

A few months ago Stewart mentioned Sweetcron as a "lifestream" solution (You can see his here).

A "lifestream" basically acts as an aggregator of all your online activities, as many of the online services that people use, such as Twitter, Flickr etc., publish your activity via RSS.

I'd already been experimenting with Movable Type's Motion, which is a pretty cool addition to an existing MT powered site, however having a separate, standalone, solution was not without its attractions. I registered michele.ie a few months ago, but apart from using it to test our Exchange mail hosting I hadn't really done anything with it.

So last night (and very early this morning) I decided to setup Sweetcron on one of our shared hosting plans. Our hosting system allows you to split your domain up across multiple hosting plans and platforms, so while the main site is now on a Linux web server the email is still on Microsoft Exchange.

I chose to setup the webspace to use PHP5, since PHP4 is defunct. In terms of the database I opted for MySQL5, since it's also the more recent version.

I'll have to admit that I hadn't used FTP for a long time. I have a habit of just doing things from the command line, but once I'd got over that it was easy enough to setup.

The documentation for Sweetcron is a bit sparse, but the basic install is easy enough. On our system you just need to remember that the MySQL database server is NOT "localhost", as the basic configuration file assumes that you're running everything on a single server.

The one step that isn't documented clearly is how to setup a simple cronjob to automate it for you. Fortunately someone else had done that already, so adding the cronjob via the hosting control panel was fine.
You just need to execute the following command every few minutes (or hours):

curl http://your/true-cron/url

You can find the actual URL in the Sweetcron admin panel. So just set that command to run via the cronjob manager and off you go.


The basic install ships with two themes, but there are several other themes available which range from the very simple to the incredibly complex. I still haven't settled on which one I actually want to use, as they all handle parts of your "stream" differently. In order to avoid duplication issues I think I'll stick with a theme that doesn't pull in the full content from blog posts and just provides a link to the original source.

So if you're bored and want to know what I'm up to you can head over to my new personal space and see!

Irish political parties are trying to use online media. Unfortunately they're more "trying" than anything else.

Remember the Green Party spamming bloggers?

How about Fine Gael ripping off the BBC website?

Well it looks like the Green Party are definitely outdoing their competitors when it comes to online idiocy. Their official Twitter account posted this charming message earlier this evening:

"If a permatanned, snake-oil selling charlatan like Bill Cullen thinks we're doing the wrong thing, we must be doing the right thing, right?"

Here's a screenshot in case they remove it:
I'm not a legal expert, but isn't that libellous?

If it's not actually libel, is it the sort of message a political party's official twitter account should be sending out?

Wouldn't their time be better spent doing something useful?

You may remember the "I'm blogging this" tshirt...

Now meet the "I'm tweeting this" version:

Find out more on ThinkGeek

When you run your own business you can end up becoming heavily invested in your business' success and failure. Comments and feedback, both positive and negative, might affect you more than you would like to admit.

Over the last few years the company I founded has grown from operating out of a bedroom (or two) to having a fulltime staff of close to 20.

Over the years we've improved some things, made a total mess of others, delighted some people and really annoyed others. (In many instances the "love" and "hate" is directed at me personally, as I am the most visible person associated with the company).

The harsh reality is that no matter what you do you cannot and will not please everyone all of the time.

Since I'm interested in my industry I track certain keywords on Twitter, so watching people talking about some of our competitors can be very enlightening.
 GoDaddy, which is simply massive in terms of its customer base, proves my point.
Just watch how people react to them over a 24 hour period.
You will see both ends of the scale.
They're all talking about the same company during the same time period, so it's really fascinating (to me at least) to watch.

Over the last couple of days we managed to get our hands on the @blacknight twitter account, so we'll be moving everything across to it.

I also realised that my own twitter username was stupidly long when it didn't have to be, so I changed it to @mneylon

Not terribly exciting, but both accounts now use shorter usernames, which on a system with character limits does make sense

The amusing side-effect of the change is that now my Twittercounter stats make it look like I'll have a silly number of followers in my network within 30 days!

Twitter seems to spawn new services on a daily basis. Some of them are useful, some strange, some really bizarre and some are pretty cool

LeCraic has started doing mugs with your Twitter followers and I was lucky enough to get one in the post the other day.

Here's a photo:




Nice idea and you can order your own here

After an extended period of downtime, while it was moved onto the Google infrastructure, Jaiku is back online.

Ciaran was following the migration's progress over on Jaiku Invites.

They seem to have opened up the invitations, presumably because they're on a much bigger platform than before and can manage the load, but whether the service will "take off" or not is hard to say.

Twitter, even if it has a horrible UI, is still a lot more popular.

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