Twitter Down due to DDOS Attack

The Fail Whale strikes again! According to this Guardian article, Twitter has been down due to a Denial Of Service attack since 3pm. I’d tweet the link, but obviously I can’t. Oh no, I can feel the shakes starting as I haven’t been able to look at my twitter stream for a few hours. Oh well, I’d use Facebook but my fear of flying sheep and superpokes prevents me from logging in .

• Twitter crashes following malicious online attack – Gaurdian.co.uk

Edit: OK, so it’s back up now. Looks like twitter gadget on my iGoogle page hasn’t realised yet. Logging into twitter.com is working. Guess the Twitter guys payed the ransom or relocated their servers to OZ.

Fun with Short URLs, because size isn’t everything

URL shortening has been around a long time. I’ve been using tinyURL for ages. Recently Twitter switched to using bit.ly as its URL shortening service. I signed up for a bit.ly account the other day and have discovered fun in its statistic tracking. For each short URL it generates, bit.ly provides a page that gives information about the number of clicks, location of the clicker as well as a list of tweets, friendfeed comments and comments from BackType that refer to it.

I am now obsessed with tracking my links and looking at the statistics for other pages. It’s really interesting to see the buzz a page can generate as well as how quickly the clicks are generated. It’s worth signing up and using the sidebar bookmarklet for a bit of real geeky fun.

Guide to Network Programming

Many moons ago I did a Systems Programming course a University. It wasn’t the best run course in the world and it left me completely confused about IP, Sockets, Streams and other related scary Unix technologies that seemed so foreign back in the late 90’s.

Recently my interest in this area has grown and I thought I’d have little look for a decent guide. I came across Beej’s Guide to Network Programming, and I heartily recommend it. If you’re interested in an introduction to BSD socket programming it’s a must read, and it’s also fairly entertaining in a geeky humor kind of way.

If you’re out there, my old System’s Programming tutor, you should definitely read it, you need the help

Everybody Loves Google

photo credit: Marianne Perdomo

I noticed this interesting article about Google on Techmeme today. Could there be a Microsoft sized backlash brewing against Google? I don’t think so. I can see why Google’s competitors might want to stir up trouble with antitrust suits but I think the average user doesn’t care. All the user cares about is that they feel that they are getting the best search results.

Everyone Loves Google, Until It’s Too Big – NYTimes.com.

Microbloggers Anonymous – Reasons to Tweet

“Hello. My name is Matt, and I’m a Microblogger”

photo credit: anomalous4

I’ve been using Twitter for a little while now. Historically I always kind of avoided social networking but after being convinced to join Facebook last year I got the bug. Twitter seems to have the Marmite effect on most people, yes you either love it or hate it. One of my friends, who is something of a web hermit, laughed when I mentioned micro-blogging and questioned why anyone would want to do such a thing. His derision fueled my self-doubt, “Why am I doing it?” I asked myself.

1. Self-Expression. This is the most import use for me. I’m probably as guily as anyone when it comes to this. I spent Friday tweeting about my hangover. I know the wider world doesn’t care, but I’m a complainer and I find it a nice outlet. I put my little message in a bottle out there, and sometimes I get a reply.
2. Conversation. It can be lonely in the Meatspace. When I’m sitting bored at work and someone puts out an interesting question or makes a statement, I can tweet them with my 2 cents. It’s a nice indirect method of communication. People compare it to SMS messaging, which I agree with, however unlike SMS, I don’t really care if I get a reply.
3. Self-promotion. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of shameless self-promotion. I might tweet a link to my blog every now and again in an attempt to build a bit of traffic.
4. Sharing. This kind of links in with number 2. If I find something I think my followers might find interesting I’ll post a link. I use del.icio.us and share on Google Reader but Twitter means people see the link straight away and will tell me if they like it.

I guess other people might find other reasons to micro-blog but those are mine. Is there anything wrong with it? I don’t think so. It is, what it is, a fun little tool for communication.

Lazy Blogging

photo credit: kretyen

Being a somewhat lazy person I’m no doubt going to find keeping regular updates to this blog difficult. I’d like to be able regularly post something that you the reader might find interesting, however life in the meatspace will inevitably get in the way. A few days ago Keiron sent me a link about posting automatically from Del.icio.us. This is a great little feature that will automatically generate a blog post of the links you have collected for the day. I’ve set it up and you can read my daily link posts for yourself.

I would like to find a way to do this for more of the services I use such as Google Reader and YouTube. I’ve installed the WP-o-Matic plugin, which seems to offer the ability to pull in RSS feeds. Not sure it’s quite what I’m after though as it just created a load of posts with copies of the items I’d shared in GReader. I’m going to have to play with it a bit more.

Do you have any clever ways to aggregate feeds from other services? Let me know.

From Del.icio.us to Wordpress: How to automatically post links at theory.isthereason