Jump Out of Your Skin

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Twitter has always been something off in the distance for me to be honest.  I thought it was a useless way of passing time.  However in the past couple of weeks I opened an account, installed Twitteriffic on my IPhone and have dipped my toe in the Twitterverse.  What do I think so far?

• There is a lot of rubbish out there but alos some gems of information.
• Some interesting news feeds like CNN and NFL (I am a big NFL fan) Playoff time means many sleepy days for me living in Ireland.
• It is difficult to find people out there who have similar interests as you using the search utility – there may be better ways – are tehre – comments please!
• You need to interact for it to be of any use.
• People are pretty friendly out there and helpful as well.
• TwitterFox is the application I use to check Twitter on the desktop
• I need to find a web based app (I am behind a firewall here that blocks traffic like twitter ot a desktop app) that allows me see Twitter, Facebook and any other social network that I am joined.
• You could waste tons of time reading peoples blogs but correspondingly if you have time to spare then it is a good way to find random interesting information.

I started writing this in Schipol airport while waiting for my flight after a days business trip to Amsterdam.  I was tapping away on my laptop thinking of what the easiset way to travel and keep up to date wit hteh office and the outside world.

Since I got my IPhone as I can now at least read my personal e-mail (not work mail as I am trapped in Lotus world) without having to drag out the laptop. 

For a start here are my must have websites that I check at least once a day if not more.

NEWS and Magazines

• New York Times – Has good editorial – I check this most days.  I like David Pogues Technology column particularly but overall the articles are good. 
• Daily Telegraph
  
• Pitchfork Media – Eclectic Music releases with their scoring system highly respected amongst music lovers.  I inevitably download an album based on their reviews.
• The Economist - Good for more in depth pieces on the world
• RTE Web Site - I am not a real fan of it and it is often behind news by quite a bit but for a quick snapshot of Irish news it is OK.
• Runnersworld – Has most of what you would get in the magazine.

One of the tasks you should do to make sure that Google can crawl your web page in WordPress is  to setup your Permalinks.  The Customize Permalink Structure can be accessed in both WordPress 2.6 and 2.7  under Settings -> Permalinks.  Here you can click on the options you want.  The default is the least favorable in my opinion but it is a matter of taste which one you choose.

Once you have done this you now have readable URLs and not ones with special characters and question marks in them which is the default for blog posts in WordPress.  I need to investigate how to put this placefor Joomla too but knowing Joomla you probably require to install an add in to do this.  I could be wrong on this.  I use Joomla for my kids basketball club and am really behing updating it as it needs a new theme and an overall spruce up  Suggestions http://www.frmathews.net