I
created a Twitter account last week and have been posting to it fairly often. Since that's likely to continue over the next week+, while I'm off in San Diego visiting relatives, doing Xmasy stuff, snowboarding at Big Bear mountain, etc. You can check that page for updates or subscribe to my feed, which I think means you get my tweets sent right to your cell phone, like any other txt msg.
Why? I'm not quite sure. I've heard of Twitter forever, but never really bothered with it. I like words, and long blog posts make me happier than 140 character blats, at least when I'm reading them on the internet, rather than from people I know in RL. However, since I send a lot of text messages, mostly to the IG, but also Malaya, other RL friends, and my parents, I figured I might as well set up Twitter and have a way to put selected texts online. I've been CCing various texts to twitter since I signed up; mostly (so far) about the new cat and how she and Jinx are getting (or not) along, but there's other utterly mundane stuff as well; after Xmas sales, car maintenance, random jokes and comments, and other even less interesting stuff. Why you must be just about breaking your mouse in your hurry to click through, by now.
Don't expect much more than that; the posts have a 140 character limit, and while they can be entered through a web browser, when I'm on my computer with time/interest in blogging, I'm more likely to write something like this. So most of mine have gone up via text message from my cell, and most of those are sent when I've got a minute or two to kill while in line at the store, while walking through a mall, or sometimes even at a traffic light. (I text pretty fast.)
If you're wondering what good Twitter is on a larger scale, I don't really know. I just signed up and I don't subscribe to anyone else's feed. I think the end game is when you and multiple online friends are using it at once, and are all subscribing to each other's feeds. Then any message you post to twitter is automatically forwarded to all of your subscribers, and you guys can have a sort of group chat via Twitter. 140 characters at a time.
Fortuitously, the former CalPundit posted a question about Twitter on his new blog a week ago, and
the comments thread is quite informative. Lots of Twitter fans posting what it's best for and why they use it. I recommend looking it over if you're new to the concept and curious, or just want to learn more.
My main complaint about Twitter so far? Horrible tech support. Very unclear set up menus, awful FAQ, very poor info on the installation and instruction pages. Took me a day of trial and error to get my phone set up to send messages, and I've found much better info about other technical issues on various blogs and tech sites, rather than by using the official Twitter help pages.
This
Twitter Fan Blog has tons of how to info, though I've only glanced over it thus far.
This blog post has detailed instructions on how to embed your Twitter feed into your own blog, which is what I want to do here. I've not done it yet, obviously, and don't know when I will. The instructions are fairly complicated, and I'm not sure where I'd put it on this site anyway. My layout now doesn't really allow for a tall rectangle of twitter posts to show anywhere, other than at the top or way down at the bottom of the nav bar, and that's kinda too narrow for them to display properly. So it'll probably just be something I want to add when I do the long overdue site remodeling. A remodel that'll likely grow much longer overdue before it ever occurs. I will at least put a link into the nav bar for it, and tidy up some of the other outdated stuff over there. For example... HGL? Really? Sheesh.
Labels: blackchampagne.com, twitter
