ITauthor

Tom Johnson has rejigged the Writer River site again to use a service called Publish2. This site is really just another link aggregation site but it has some features that make it really useful. The great thing about it is the bookmarklet that adds a sidebar to whatever Web page you’re reading. From this sidebar you can add an item to your personal list of page links, stored by Publish2.

The other things you can do with the sidebar are:

• Add the link to any of the newsgroups you belong to.
  Tom has set up a “Technical Communication” newsgroup and it’s the links that get added to this newsgroup that appear on Writer River. This is great because it means you can have your own personal list and then, from that, choose who you share particular links with.
• Send a tweet about the page.
  Rather than going to your twitter client and tweeting about this separately – just write your tweet in the sidebar.
• Publish the link to your blog or to delicious.
  The sidebar has WordPress and delicious integration. In my case, I want to have my own “What I’m Reading” list in my WordPress blog. So I have a “What I’m Reading” category already set up and I have Publish2 set to select this as the default category. The good thing about this is that if Publish2 disappeared tomorrow I wouldn’t lose all my “What I’m Reading” links they way I would if I was just adding details dynamically to my site by pulling in information from the RSS feed for my list at Publish2. There is a Publish2 JavaScript widget that you can add to any Web page to pull information down from Publish2 if you want to do it that way. But by actually posting to my blog from the sidebar it means that data is saved to my WordPress database as well as to Publish2’s database.
  

So here’s how I add things to my “What I’m Reading” list. Note: the way I used to populate this list is described in this post – but it was massively complicated compared to this method.

1. When I've read a page I think other tech writers might be interested in I just go to my Bookmarks list, click the Publish2 link and fill out the sidebar form that's displayed.
2. I type in a description of what I like about the page in the Public Comments box.
3. I select the check box for the Technical Communication newsgroup.
4. The check box for twitter is selected by default - I just add some tweet text.
5. In the Also add this link to section I select the check box for ITauthor.com.  My What I'm Reading category is already selected - I just have to copy some text from the Public Comments box and that becomes a link to the article in the resulting blog post.
6. I click Save and I'm done.
   
   My blog's updated with a new post, Writer River also gets a new link entry and a tweet gets sent out to my twitter followers.
   
   Quick, easy and kills three birds with one stone. Brilliant!

If you're toggling something between two states in PHP or Perl it's often handy to use an if/then/else one liner.

In pseudocode this goes like this:

<if this evaluates to TRUE> then <parse this> else <parse this>

All you need to do is replace the "then" with a question mark and the "else" with a colon:

<if this evaluates to TRUE> ? <parse this> : <parse this>

For example:

print  $trueOrFalse ? "you're telling the truth" : "you're lying";

Ignore the print command, it's not part of the if/then/else statement, it's just here to do something with the outcome of that statement.

The expression immediately to the left of the question mark is evaluated. The expression between the question mark and the colon is parsed if the expression evaluates to TRUE, otherwise the expression immediately to the right of the colon is parsed. So in the above example, either "you're telling the truth" or "you're lying" is printed, depending on whether $trueOrFalse is ... you guessed it ... TRUE or FALSE.

But perhaps a more common situation is toggling the value assigned to a variable. For example, toggling between TRUE and FALSE:

$trueOrFalse = $trueOrFalse ? FALSE : TRUE;

Here's a practical example of the use of if/then/else one liners. There's two in this chunk of PHP. The scroll box list below the code is the kind of thing this PHP produces.

<div style="overflow:auto; height:100px; width:300px; border:3px groove #DDD; padding:0">
<?php
    $alternateLine = FALSE;
    while($presidentsArray) {
        print "<div style=\"background-color:";
        print $alternateLine ? "#F5F8F9" : "white";
        print "; padding-bottom: 1px\"> &nbsp; &nbsp; <a href=\"someURL\" title=\"This link goes nowhere\">" .
          $presidentsArray['name'] . "</a></div>";
        $alternateLine = $alternateLine ? FALSE : TRUE;
    }
?>
</div>

Right now, as I write, there is an ugly gap at the top right of all ITauthor.com pages. It used to be filled by an audio player called EasyListener, provided by Yahoo, that I just embedded in my side panel. It was the best thing of its kind because it was neat enough to fit in a slim side panel and it was simple. It read from an RSS feed, pulled out the MP3 files and listed them in the player. You just clicked on the item you wanted and it played the audio.

But Yahoo quietly choked it and hoped that nobody noticed. I’m not sure why they would do this. I’m sure they could handle the bandwidth of people pulling down the Shockwave file off some server that had been left to serve up the old webjay.org pages. Maybe someone at Yahoo just pulled the plug on that server and not enough people have complained. I wish I’d gone and grabbed the files while they were still there. I looked at archive.org but the URL was never spidered.

So I’m going to have to find another solution, but it won’t be for a while because I know there’s nothing quite like it out there, so I’ll have to do some switching around and PHP-ing to sort it out.

It’s symptomatic of the Web though: it seems like a solid, reliable structure, but it’s really entirely transitory and kept in working order by a lot of people and a lot of effort. It’s a bit like a car: as soon as you fix one thing, something else breaks.

Not everyone wants to prat around setting up a blog and configuring it to look just right. Yes, I know, some of us spend an inordinate amount of time doing just that. But my wife, my kids, my mum – most normal folk in fact – just don’t have the time, patience, reason or inclination.

Nevertheless, lots of people would still like somewhere to share photos (if it was really easy to do), or they might want somewhere to collect stuff they’ve spotted somewhere online, or they might want to keep notes somewhere they can always get to easily, or they might want to share and save conversations with loved ones, or they might want to start podcasting, or they might want to … well, the list goes on.

Posterous allows you to do all this:

• without signing up for anything
• without setting up anything or choosing options
• without having to pay
• without having to wait for more than about a minute for your new blog to be available

How does it work? Send an email to post@posterous.com.

Then what? No, that’s it. That’s all you do. Just send the email. The subject of the email becomes the title of your first post on your new blog and the content of the email becomes the content of your first post.

Wait a short while and an automated email comes back telling you the address of your new blog. Email post@posterous.com again and you’ve got a new post on your blog. Attach a photo to your email and it appears at the top of your post. Attach several photos and you get a control for seeing them all in the order you attached them. Attach a sound file and you get an audio player embedded in your post. Attach a video, or a PDF, or a Word document and … well, you get the picture – it all just works sensibly without you having to do anything complicated.

Some great features

If you want to choose your own subdomain name (like leoville.posterous.com/) you need to sign up, but it’s painless. You can then manage your blog, add additional email addresses if, for example, you want to post from gmail when you’re at home, Outlook when you’re at work, and using your Blackberry mobile email address when you’re out and about.

You can also set up multiple blogs and use them for different purposes. When you have multiple blogs (e.g. a work one, a family one and a club one) you can choose which one you post to by using the subdomain name (e.g. post@yoursubdomain.posterous.com instead of post@posterous.com).

You can allow other people to email to your site by adding them as contributors.

You can make a blog private so that your need to enter a password before you get to see the blog.

If you trust posterous with your login details for other places (e.g. twitter, Facebook, other blogs, etc.) you can post to multiple places at once. You can choose to post to all your other places (by mailing post@yoursubdomain.posterous.com) or you can select just to mail to selected places (e.g. twitter+facebook+posterous@yoursubdomain.posterous.com). You can even use posterous as a way of posting to an existing blog without posting to posterous, which is useful once you realise how convenient posting by email is, but your existing blog doesn’t have that facility.

You can tag your posts just by adding ((tags: your tag)) at the end of your email subject line.

Easy subscription. The people who will find posterous most useful probably don’t use RSS aggregators – even Google Reader. As a result they may not click the Subscribe to this posterous link when they go visit a posterous blog, and if they’ve ever clicked a Subscribe link before they’ve probably been put off the idea because all they’ll usually get is an RSS page with little clue what to do with it. But if they do click the Subscribe to this posterous, and provided they’re signed in, they’re going to like what happens because all that happens is the link changes to tell them they’re now subscribed. What happens after that is that they get a daily email with updates from all of the blogs they’ve subscribed to. And if you’re a regular email user (and who’s not? – for most people it’s still the killer app) then that’s exactly how you want to get things you subscribe to. You don’t want to have to go away and manually check in another place, like Google Reader, you want stuff to come to you, in your inbox.

The bookmarklet. This is just a smart bookmark that you can add to your browser from your posterous site. Whenever you’re using the browser and you come to something interesting, just pull up the bookmark and you can quickly post it to your blog. The bookmarklet window gives you a choice of all the photos on the page and you can choose one of them to include in your post.

A few example uses of posterous

All day diary writing

If you’ve got email on your phone, posterous is a great way of keeping a diary. You never want to write up a diary last thing at night, but you might want to write up little one-liners or short paragraphs during the day when you’ve got a minute, or you’re waiting for the bus and got nothing better to do.

Create a posterous blog and mark it private. Add the email address to your contact list. Then just post to it every now and again.

Share stuff with friends

Out and about and see something interesting, photograph it with your phone and email the picture to posterous. Add your friends as contributors and get them all to email photos. You then end up with a social site for a group of friends that you might not want all your other Facebook friends to see.

Subject-specific site

Want to collect ideas together in one place, either just you or you and friends, family, work colleagues, club members, etc. Make a little posterous site just for one subject. You could have a family site, a site for your department at work, a site dedicated to one specific event – whatever you want, it doesn’t cost anything so it can be as trivial or short-lived as you want. But it can also be a permanent place to gather photos and videos.

Lifestreaming

Because posterous hooks up to Facebook and twitter and FriendFeed and Flickr and YouTube and so on, it means you can post to one place, with a single email, but update all your online locations. Some people follow you on twitter but don’t use Facebook, others are Facebook fanatics but just don’t get twitter. This way one email and you cover everyone.

And if you want you can keep your photos on Flickr, your videos on YouTube, your in-depth thoughts on your WordPress blog and your fly-away, ephemeral comments on twitter – but aggregate them all in one place on posterous to the complete record of you.

Preserving email conversations

Over the years my wife and I have discussed a ton of things via email. Most of it’s inconsequential, but some of it’s funny, sometimes it’s maybe touching, often it’s just plain silly – but almost all of it is now gone. It’d be really nice to have all of that, both sides of the conversations, preserved in one place and easy to search through. With posterous that’s dead easy.

Set up a private blog that only you two have access to. Each change the other’s email address in your contact lists to the email address of this posterous site. Now when you email each other you still get the emails, but the emails are also collected together in one place, online, as a blog.

Podcasting

Want to be a podcaster? Never bothered because it all seemed too complicated. Now it’s not complicated at all. Just record some audio (e.g. on your iPhone) and post it to posterous. Then put the following in your posterous Profile:

<a href="itpc://yoursubdomain.posterous.com/rss">Get the podcast in iTunes</a>

When someone clicks the link it will open up iTunes and subscribe them to your podcast. Alternatively, just putting /rss on the end of your posterous URL to display the RSS feed with enclosed audio files. People without iTunes can use this feed with an alternative podcast client.

Other stuff

I’ve only been looking at posterous for a couple of days. I’m sure there’s lots more you can do with it. Let me know if you know of any other good ideas.

Want to know more? Go to http://posterous.com/faq/.

Here’s a good idea from Dave Winer (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6748103.stm): perpetual hosting.

Suppose you write a diary-style blog and you want to give your great-great-great grandchildren the chance to read about the life of their distance forebears. How are you going to do that? Right now, if you get run over by a bus tomorrow, when your hosting company mails you to tell you you need to renew your hosting deal or your domain name nobody’s going to pay up and your blog will disappear from the blogosphere. It’ll probably remain in some form within the Internet Archive, but no one will find it there and it won’t look or work like it was supposed to.

What you need is for someone (Google is the obvious candidate) to offer to capture your fully functional blog, or website of any kind, and keep it in its fully working state for ever, for a one-off payment.

Probably, for an additional regular payment, they’d snapshot your site on a regular basis. But, because you’ve made the initial lump sum payment, when you pop your clogs and stop paying for the snapshotting, the blog will just stay up there as you left it. I like to think of it as internet cryogenics.

For a company with vast storage capacity and the chutzpah to think they might be in operation for ever, it’s a sure-fire money making venture if ever there was one. So come on Google, what’re you waiting for?