Allen Lew's Thoughts » Software

My Favorite Twitter Tools

Allen Lew — Mon, 23 May 2011 17:42:07 +0000

Twitter

The Twitter ecosystem gets bigger with each passing day and developers are building more and more great tools to use with it. Listed below are some of my favorite ways of using these developer tools with Twitter.

Natter- The official Twitter app for Facebook has not been updated for a while (not for a lack of trying on Twitter’s part either). Fortunately, Natter improves on the official app in a couple of ways. First, it will actually take links you tweet about and put in a Facebook like preview box with a thumbnail as well. Second, Twitter names get translated to real names listed on their profiles, so you don’t show off the @username notation. Lastly, comment replies on Facebook are sent back to your Twitter stream as @mentions from Natterapp, which means you can track your conversation on Twitter. The one improvement I’d like to see from Natter is to have retweets posted on your Facebook profile like LinkedIn currently does. Still, if you were looking for a better way to integrate your Twitter and Facebook accounts, this is the app for you.

Natter syncs your Tweets with Facebook
The Archivist-A project from Microsoft’s Mix Online Labs, The Archivist breaks down data on a particular topic on Twitter. Just type in a search term or a #hashtag and the Archivist will present you with a latest tweet archive for a topic along with a set of visualizations for a given topic such as who has tweeted it the most often, other associated words, what links are associated with that topic, and even what clients are the most popular. It’s great for the marketing person who wants to know how their Twitter campaign is doing or the data geek who’s wants to know more about a meme they saw.
The Archivist
Google Search Twitter-Search on Twitter is limited to about 3 days. However, the partnerships Twitter has formed with Google and Microsoft, you can use their search engines to go back further in the Twitter archive. There are a couple of ways to access it. On Google, you just type the topic and thing click the real time link on the left hand side. However, you can also do site specific searches on Google by adding the “site:twitter.com” operator and that will limit your searches to tweets.

Well that’s some of my favorite Twitter utilities. I’m anxious to hear about yours. Leave me a comment and let me know about them.

Site Changes for 2010

Allen Lew — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:43:30 +0000

My site

With the long 4th of July Weekend, I thought it was time for my yearly site refresh. After upgrading to WordPress 3.0 (which has a number of advanced features like Custom Post Types and Multiple Sites installations), I decided to make two major cosmetic changes to the site.

I decided to change the site’s theme to Thirty Ten, a three-column version of the new WordPress default theme, Twenty Ten. Like all of the times I change themes, the old theme is still pretty good, but I just felt the need to experiment with a new design. I especially like that asides have been given their own style and that it’s easy to place my own header images (which I hope to do in the coming weeks).
Since I recently joined up with an online advertising company, I wanted to understand more about the business. So I reactivated my Google Adsense account, and decided to place ads on my site and feed. I had resisted putting ads on my site since I first started it (which when I think about it seems odd, since I was making less money then I do now), but it felt right to try this out. We’ll see how this experiment goes.

So check feel free to check out my new web site at allen.alew.org.

Split First and Last Name into Seperate Columns in Excel.

Allen Lew — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 06:27:07 +0000

If you have a First Name and Last Name in one column in Excel, here’s a tutorial on splitting them into two separate columns (without VB macros) from LauraJ’s blog. It involves using the Data to Text feature. Very handy. … finish reading Split First and Last Name into Seperate Columns in Excel. No related posts.

Getting Flash to Work with Ubuntu 7.10

Allen Lew — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 06:00:08 +0000

If you haven’t been able to install Adobe Flash Player on your Ubuntu 7.10 install, Jayson Joseph Chacko wrote an excellent post with a set of terminal commands to get Adobe Flash installed. Thanks Jayson.

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Check out GMU’s Center for History and New Media Web projects

Allen Lew — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:23:35 +0000

Center for History and New Media

George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media has been really putting out some great online academic tools. They’re the ones behind the Zotero research extension for Firefox. Now they are developing some software for web sites like Omeka, an open source content management system for museum collections and exhibits, and ScholarPress, plugins designed to make WordPress more usable for college classes.

ScholarPress has two plugins right now, Courseware, for adding syllabi and assignments, and WPBook, a way of converting your WordPress blog as a Facebook Application. The two developers, Jeremey Boggs and Dave Lester, also host a podcast called THAT podcast and have posted a tutorial on using the Scholarpress plugins along with an interview with Matt Mullenweg as the first episode. I certainly admire them for the impressive amount of work they have put in to all of these projects and look forward to trying their tools out in the future. (via Photo Matt)

Flopshow

Allen Lew — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 21:55:23 +0000

In case you have some old floppy disks around and can’t get the files out, try out FlopShow. It’s a free and simple floppy disk restore program.

Simple Contextual Advertising System

Google Maps for Palm

Allen Lew — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 06:24:57 +0000

So I just got a Palm T|X from work at Los Angeles Urban League. One of the downsides of working in this part of LA is there isn’t a lot of free wi-fi points to make use of the Internet capabilities. Meanwhile, my current favorite app for the handheld so far is Google Maps for Palm. It’s application built on top of the web based maps, and works quite quickly. They also have a Pocket PC edition as well.

Startup Guides

Allen Lew — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 06:49:51 +0000

A few blog posts about some other software and Internet services that might be useful for starting up a company (or nonprofit).

Read and Write Web’s Software for Virtual Teams
Nick Denton’s (owner of Gawker and Lifehacker) Startup Kit
Evan Williams’s (founder of blogger.com) list of business web apps
Added: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Web 2.0: Top 25 Apps to Grow your Business

In summary, you’ll need these applications the most:

Email- Gmail is the most popular.
Calendar to keep track of time- Google Calendar couples with Gmail, both can be used with your domain
Project Management to keep track of what needs to be done- Basecamp and FogBugz
VoIP for cheap Internet phone calls. Skype is the most recommended, though Jajah and Gizmo Project seem to be gaining.
A blog- They’ve recommended Typepad and Blogger, but I still recommend WordPress (there’s also a hosted version)

More thoughts on MacWorld

Allen Lew — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 21:03:07 +0000

Photoshop CS3 looks really cool. The perspective grid looks amazing. By far that was the best conference I attended.
Most of the conferences I wanted to go to were really full, which really sucks. Hope that means they’re good.
I’m tempted to buy the disk for the conferences I missed from Macworld Encore. At $99, it maybe a better value than the conference itself.

Semagic

Allen Lew — Fri, 12 May 2006 02:03:27 +0000

Semagic, the best Livejournal client for Windows, is now also a decent general blogging client. Works with MSN Spaces, Xanga, and others. I’d wish it fetched my WordPress categories automatically.

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