9 hours ago
Angry Robot BooksUpdate to a Favorite Tool
Two pretty cool updates yesterday from social media related apps that I use. #Klout added G+ to it’s indexing and since I am using G+ more and more it will be relevant to what I am doing. This is a passive update and I did not have to do anything really, it just happened. The other is a bit bigger for me personally and a lot more fun.
I’ve been a user of #hootsuite for a couple of years. It started as strictly a twitter client, but they have steadily added features . I used it when I was powering twitter and had three accounts. I have backed off and really only watch one of them now. I just don’t have the time to work it like I used to. I went through a lull when I started my new job hardly checking it more than once a day and interacting very little. (My Klout score suffered) I am slowly working back into the swing of things and today when I opened Hootsuite I found they had added Apps. The two I am mildly jazzed about are Flickr and Tumblr. Let me ‘splain.
Flickr, while a great site 6 years ago (and for what it is), still a great site, has fallen short and become a stagnant beast that a power user bangs his head against on a daily basis trying to keep up with all his contacts. This is obvious to everyone except the stewards of Flickr – Yahoo. Very little if any major changes to the social aspects of Flickr have been made in house. You can make a connection to other users by designating them as contacts. Your home page has a small section for those contacts, but I have no idea how it determines what images it is going to place there from those contacts. They sure as heck aren’t the obvious, most recently uploaded images. The only way to see those is about two or three menus deep. I am sure there are other user developed tools for getting around this. The app community is pretty rich and deep, just to me, adding the functionality into something I already use a bunch ROCKS. So now I can create a new tab within Hootsuite (which is a web application so I can access it anywhere) that has a live feed of image posts from all of my contacts. As you can see above, you can also create a feed for your own images or a feed based on a search. Very cool, thanks Hootsuite.
The addition of Tumblr while good is not as big a deal for me, but I like having my dashboard available to just keep up with.
Sorry for the Mess
Working on installing a fairly complicated theme, so the place is going to look really terrible. maybe for a few days.
Project 365 – Intermission 1
Well, this last weekend was a 3 day weekend, so as fate would have it I caught some sort of bug that had me feeling like crap. No photography happened, I pretty much stayed in a drug induced state of semi-consciousness. We watched some movies courtesy of Netflix and I read a little, coughed and wheezed and had a rotten time. No fun for the wife either. This one creeped up on me and I was a full day in before i realized what was up. Hopefully I’ll be back in the saddle with some more posts today or tomorrow.
Podcasts
Sunday night has turned into my weekly podcast evening. I have several that I enjoy, time permitting. My routine used to be one of Leo Laporte’s podcasts, either Windows Weekly or TWIT possibly both if I got started early enough. Then I would listen to Major Nelson’s xBox 360 podcast as it does not get uploaded till Sunday evening.
I’ve added a couple more shows, and moved them to the top of the list now that I am trying to do more 3d and 2d work on the computer. The goal is to eventually (once my skills reflect the goal) snag some freelance graphics work and possibly land a day job in that industry. These podcasts are both from graphics artists, Ninja Mountain and WIP and are geared at artists trying to break into the freelance illustration market, primarily SciFi and Fantasy. They are very entertaining listens and offer some great insights and advice. You also get some great interviews Ninja Mountain in particular just did a 2 hour interview of artists at GenCon that was great.
Check em out, and hopefully I’ll still find time for the other casts still too.
3D Stainless Steel Printing
This really isn’t a new technology, but it is getting easier and cheaper. Ten years ago this would have caused the DIY scenes collective heads to explode. Even now it is pretty remarkable. Take a look at Shapeways site for some examples with the pricing for printing things in metal.
Blog may experience some weirdness
I am experiementing with themes so things may get wonky again. Some of the things I load in my sidebar are not really updated pluggins so they take some tweaking to get to work.
Sorry I’ve been away
Not promising anything, but we’ll see about some more posts. For now I thought I would point out an interesting hit from another one of those oddly named towns.
Bad Frakenhausen, Germany
Perpetuating a spontanious meme
Posting this because the blog I saw it on posted it because they found it randomly and was a mused.
Jumping on the bandwagon
Not sure if this is really a meme, but it is spreading around some of the folks I follow on Friendfeed and twitter (which has gotten very reliable again) The one hundred pushup challenge. I started this morning, and hopefully by posting I shame myself into completing it. I started out solidly in rank 3 so was not incredibly ashamed from the get go.