With the incredibly rapid growth of instant-blogging services like Twitter, Jaiku and Stumblr, it’s understandable that not everyone has had a chance yet to figure out what exactly to use them for. In particular, not everyone using these services has developed the ability to discern what information is and is not interesting to their subscribers. I’m getting a little tired of receiving a text message every time someone feels the need to announce the flavour of the sandwich he or she is presently eating. That doesn’t mean I want to stop receiving all of your updates; some I may really need.

My solution is to take a multileveled approach to blogging. So… how much do you really want to know about me?

• “I only want to know when you post or find something really outstanding” - Your best bet is my submitted-stories feed (rss) at Digg. I tend to submit only what I consider my best posts; no need to spam every little update!
• “I’d like to subscribe to blog posts you’ve taken the time to sit down and write/edit” - Just subscribe to Skin Deep (rss).
• “I’d like to hear what you’re up to if it’s just a couple short posts a day.” - Add me on Twitter. I promise not to tweet about my lunch. You might want to subscribe to the Skin Deep feed also.
• “I’m pretending to be you; I need to know everything!” - Just about all my activity on the web ends up on my Tumblr blog. This includes
• My posts to Skin Deep and other blogs
• My photo uploads to Flickr
• Twitter updates
• My favourite music (via last.fm, as soon as I figure out how to mod the feed with Pipes)
• Screenshots of sites who’s design I find inspirational
• My YouTube videos
• Bookmarked pages (from del.icio.us)
• Stories I’ve dugg
• and on Reddit
• and DZone
• Goals on 43things
• My reviews on Gamespot and TV.com (if I ever decide there’s a point in doing such a thing)
• Movies I’m watching (Netflix)
• My event schedule on Upcoming
• and god knows what else.
• “I’m a Jaiku user.” - I signed up at Jaiku today. I don’t expect to do much direct Jaikuing, so I imported my Tumblr feed. Since Tumblr doesn’t allow for comments, you can head over to my Jaiku page to reply to anything on my tumblelog.

Each of these publishing platforms have a different angle, and all are incredibly useful and fun. The trick is to know what to combine, and what to keep separate. Nobody wants to get a text message to his mobile from Twitter every time you listen to a song in your media player, but on your last.fm or personal homepage that might be damn cool.
Lastly, if you use any of these gimme your username(s)!

Code output is only an accurate measurement of a productive day if your primary objective is to write code. As great as it feels to make easily-measurable technical progress, my primary goal is to get paid. As such, my most productive days are those which produce no code at all. So far today I’ve

• Secured a paying Rails project
• Created a “weekly budget” I can actually stick to
• Reallocated my time, freeing up 50 hours/month to earn a bit of income (Most of my time goes into my startup, which doesn’t pay)
• Finalized my plans to visit NYC on April 20th-22nd (shackshoppin & ravin it up at candyball)
• Completed three levels of Tomb Raider: Legends (I’m not much of a gamer, but this one is awesome)
• Continued to procrastinate on my taxes

Why are you still reading this?! Why am I still writing this!? Go find something productive to do!

“…the bigger (and as yet uncaptured) opportunity for the command line is on smart mobile devices.” I can’t wait for this to happen!

read more | digg story

I got there through an intriguing ad in some blog sidebar. The landing page was the usual “We-haven’t-launched-yet-give-us-your-email”. The product didn’t necessarily interest me. But I gave them my email anyway. Why?

Cute form. On the other side of it they wanted me to take a 5 minute survey. Who do you know that has five minutes to spend on a survey for a company they’ve never heard of?

Got me again. Then they offered me early beta access if I put one of their badges on my blog.

How could I resist? The survey ended at http://www.mymint.com/blog/, where I read the whole front page.

These guys are good.

“The Irony mark (؟) is a punctuation mark that purports to indicate that a sentence should be understood at a second level. It is illustrated by a backward-facing question mark. An irony mark may sometimes be referred to as an irony point, snark or zing.” - Wikipedia

“The interrobang is a rarely used, nonstandard English-language punctuation mark intended to combine the functions of a question mark and an exclamation point. The typographical character resembles those marks superimposed one over the other, and the name interrobang comes from interro - from interrogative - and bang - used to amplify the exclamation.” - Wikipedia

Of course, these really won’t be useful until people understand what they mean. Toward this end I suggest we begin using them where applicable, with the hope that people will ask (or perhaps with an explanatory footnote). What do you think?

Add the directory to the semicolon-delimited registry key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment\Path”, then restart explorer.exe. This took me 20 minutes to figure out, so I suppose it is worth recording here for the future.

If you have Ruby installed then you can simplify this chore with the patheditor gem. Run

gem install patheditor

And then

path_editor --add c:\your\path

That’s much better!

There’s no guarantee that the users of your plugin will have the $() shortcut mapped to JQuery, so internally you should replace it with it’s JQuery() alias. This is specifically an issue for pages utilizing both JQuery and Prototype (and thus anyone using the server-side framework Ruby on Rails). I’m sure this has been covered elsewhere - just wanted to reiterate it because it can be easy to forget. Thanks!

:)

It turns out I’m not the only one who finds Snap.com’s javascript website-preview popups incredibly annoying, useless and distracting. They provide a global-disable option, but it stores your preferences in a cookie - hardly an ideal solution; cookies aren’t exactly permanent. Another way to disable Snap would be via greasemonkey script, but I find this answer to be the simplest of all. If you have Adblock installed, simply add this to your filters:

http://spa.snap.com/snap_preview_anywhere.js

Not only will snap.com now be permanently disabled, but your pages will also be 1.44k lighter. Does anyone really think this script is helpful?!

Update: I’ve discovered another culprit; Websnapr.com. To disable websnapr preview bubbles you should also blacklist

previewbubble.js
websnapr.js
websnapr.css
bloggerbubble.js

Click here to download the filterset to import into Adblock

Well, I’m back from my cruise (it was amazing), and I finally got my laptop back (does anyone consider two weeks a reasonable turnaround for a simple dvd drive replacement?), as well as my replacement HTC Apache. ppcgeeks.com is spitting out 500 errors, so I’m stuck with Verizon’s crap firmware. Oh well. March has been a tough month for hardware, it seems.

As soon as I get Vista installed I should be back to work. Good thing, too. Money’s getting mad tight :(

Are the benefits of OS-integrated virtualization being outweighed by the benefits of healthy competition? I have a feeling the next two years will be interesting to watch, however the story plays out.

read more | digg story