Blog.NicholasPatten.com

A friend of mine introduced me to Tweetnest a week or so ago. Tweetnest allows you to save all of your data/links from twitter onto your own website/database. For more detail please visit their site.

For the past few years I've been sending out links to tutorials, architecture, designs, videos, etc. One of the great features of Tweetnest is the ability to search. As of right now it only loads the last 3,200 tweets due to Twitter's API limitations. But if you were to start now it would collect all of the important tweets your sending out, you will have to reload the "loadtweets.php" file in order for it to load in all the recent information (see below on how to setup cronjob). For me, my most important tweets are the tutorials. I sometimes forget about them and then am never to visit the page again. This is a great solution to being able to search within the information you've already shared and/or for others to search on your site for the information their looking for.

Below I've created links to tutorial search results of the links I've sent out. I have a cronjob set to go out every night at midnight to pull in all of my recent tweets so it's constantly updated.

Tutorial: After Effects

Tutorial: Cinema 4D

Tutorial: CSS

Tutorial: Drupal

Tutorial: Fireworks

Tutorial: Flash

Tutorial: HTML

Tutorial: Illustrator

Tutorial: InDesign

Tutorial: JavaScript

Tutorial: jQuery

Tutorial: Photoshop

Tutorial: PHP

Tutorial: Ruby

Tutorial: SEO

Tutorial: WordPress

Those are a few examples of tutorial categories that will help you focus in on each different platform/software that you're learning. Let me know of any great examples of how you personally use Tweetnest to organize your data.

How to set up cron jobs:
Once setting up tweetnest on my site I realized the headache of having to load the "loadtweets.php" page daily to make sure it was up-to-date so I did some searching and found this great post "Keeping your Tweets with Tweet Nest" and it describes how to set up the cron job under the "Fire And Forget" section.

Step 1: Go to Backupify.com and under the "Basic" signup click "Sign Up Now" - This is free

Step 2: Put in your information and sign up, Backupify will send you an activation email, check your email and click the activate link.

Step 3: On Backupify.com Go to Settings, then scroll down until you see the Facebook option, then click "manage"

Step 4: Click the "Connect with Facebook" button and allow Backupify access to your information.

Step 5: It will then give you check box options of the following: Photos, Friends, Statuses, Links, Notes, Events - Check the boxes of what you'd like to save/backup, then hit save.

Step 6: Now click on the "Archives" tab at the top and then on the "Select A Service" drop down menu select "Facebook"

Step 7: It will now show you all of your information that it pulled from Facebook. This includes your metadata (who your friends are, etc)
Here is what mine looks like.

Now you have all of your information on Backupify.com and you can easily save the files you want to your computer if needed.

Keep in mind that now that you have backed up all your images, and friend list you can now go through Facebook and delete the images. But you will need to untag everyone in the pictures and delete the comments so that these images don't show up on your friends accounts if you delete your Facebook account. If you don't do this it will show up as "Your friend" tagged in Annonymous user's picture and the image will still show up even if you've deleted it.

I went through my Facebook account and "right-clicked" and "saved image as" for all of the images I wanted to make sure were backed up. At the same time I untagged and deleted all the comments.

As said before, I used Facebook because it "was" secure and private, this is not the case anymore. I strongly suggest you either use Facebook as a public site or not use it all.

Hope this helps. Let me know if there are other ways of doing this.

I have Google Alerts set up so anytime my name is mentioned it will email me with a link to where it's located. This morning I got a message saying my name was listed here. (Update, as soon as I was about done with this post they deleted their post - screen capture below). It's a complete copy of my previous post. This isn't that big of a deal and the tutorial is everywhere across the web now. I realized the person was so lazy that he/she didn't even bother to host their own images. Instead they were linking to my images. This is just pure laziness. If you're going to steal content, at least save the images to your own hosting, and take the person's name off your post. Or you can do the correct thing and email the original writer for permission, or do a partial bit about the post and then link to the original post (be the middle-man).

The end result is that I got to have a little fun. :)
I changed each image so that when read vertically it says the following:

"It's Not Cool
at all
to steal content
from other people.
If you're going to
steal content
at least host your own images.
P.S. - This could say worse things
thanks :)"

The lesson here is to create your own content and then share links to the content that is already created.

Below is the before and after.

After:

And another part of their website:

I'm not going to rant, yet, about how I've started to dislike Facebook. Instead, here is how you can turn off "Instant Personalization."

Step 1: Login to Facebook
Step 2: On the top right click on "Account" and then click on "Privacy Settings"

Step 3: Click on "Applications and Websites" - highlighted in green.

Step 4: At the bottom where it says "Instant Personalization" click on "Edit Setting" - highlighted in green.

Update: 04/24/10: You also want to edit the "What your friends can share about you" settings. Once you're in there, you want to deselect everything in that section. And also go to these three pages and click on "Block Application" on the top left for each: Microsoft Docs.com, Pandora, Yelp. Or if those links don't work they are also on this page. (Thanks @melfi)

Step 5: Uncheck "Allow select partners to instantly personalize their features with my public information when I first arrive on their websites." This will prevent Facebook from allowing Pandora and Docs.com and Yelp to show you customized content based on your Facebook details. - highlighted in green.


Step 6: Select "Confirm" - highlighted in green.


If you notice, it says "Please keep in mind that if you opt out, your friends may still share public Facebook information about you to personalize their experience on these partner sites unless you block the application." in small print.

To see what applications have access to your data and to stop the access you can follow the instructions below:

Step 1: On the top right click on "Account" and then click "Application Settings"

Step 2: It will automatically display the "recently used" applications, so it looks as if no editing is needed but don't be fooled. Click on the drop down menu where it says "Recently Used" - highlighted in green.

Step 3: Click on "Authorized" - highlighted in green. It will now show the complete list of authorized third party apps that are able to use your information. Delete the third party apps you no longer use. By writing this tutorial I actually found many old apps that I no longer use that were attached to my data still.


Below is the list of apps I have authorized to use my data. I have Friendfeed feeding in everything from my Twitter account and it has its own tab in my profile so my friends aren't bombarded with the links I send out daily, but yet they can still view them if wanted. And I have my Posterous connected because it's awesome.

Step 4: Delete anything on Facebook you don't want the public to see, read, and/or share about you.

Rant: If you're like me, someone who was a college student right when Facebook came out, in fact my school was so small we were using the now defunct "thecollegefacebook.com" or "collegefacebook.com" (Can't remember) because Facebook hadn't added our school yet. Finally they added us and we had to have a school email to even sign up. 6 years later and now Facebook wants to go from a closed environment to an open (closed) environment where the whole world can see anything and everything about you and use that data to profit. One little step at a time, to get you used to the idea.

I've grown to accept that Facebook will never be what it was before. I understand the "Change or die" rule comes into play here for sure. I know it will move on and the new generation of Facebook users, young and old, will accept it for what it is because they never experienced it in it's prime. So much for my rule of only accepting friend requests of people I've actually met, in the end I won't be shocked if it's all available through Google search.

P.S. - Facebook, change the "Info" section back to how it was, not everything needs to look like a news feed.

Related Links: Your Mom’s Guide to Those Facebook Changes, and How to Block Them

Recently I've had a few people email me and direct message me on twitter about how I added images to the right side of my posterous site.
So here is my attempt to explain how.

You will need the following:
1. Hosting (for the images to be displayed) - for example my image files are all running from nicholaspatten.com
2. Images already made to put on the side bar (the images I use are 150px wide)

Instructions:
1. Login to Posterous.com (I have highlighted the areas in blue that you will need to click)
2. Click Manage
3. Click "Your Account" under the Settings tab
4. Click "Your Profile"
5. In the "Your Bio" box (Highlighted in green) you will need to insert HTML code for each image. (Keep in mind you will need to have the image on your own hosting site. It's never smart to link directly to someone elses image because you never know how long that image is going to be live and/or they can change the image to be something completely different without you noticing)

Here is the HTML code for each image button/advertisement

a href="http://bit.ly/dp78WW" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.nicholaspatten.com/ads/imwithcoco.jpg"/></a

add < at the beginning and > at the end

Looks like:

You can also do this for your menu options like I have with my site (for example: Subscribe, Snowboard Designs, Free iPhone Wallpaper Designs, etc)

Every time I post something new I make sure to tag it so that it will show up when someone clicks the side bar links. If I create a new snowboard design, I will go to the new post and add the tag "snowboard design" to it. Not only is this good for SEO purposes but it also allows the viewer to get to the content faster.

Below is what the code looks like:

Hopefully that helped explain a little bit of how you can use simple HTML techniques to make your posterous page a little different from everyone elses. If there is a better way of doing this feel free to add a link in the comments.
Have any questions? Leave a comment.

Update: 04/04/2010
Related Article: Posterous Tip: How To Add Tags When Blogging by Email?

By the way, I'm with Coco :)