Follow Someone Anonymously on Twitter
Over time I’ve come accross several people whose Twitter accounts I’d like to keep up with but don’t want to follow. Some are people I’m just mildly interested in. Others are people that I don’t want knowing that I’m following them. Twitter’s Lists feature gives me a great way to do this by creating a private list.
Here’s how to do it:
1 – Go to twitter.com and sign in.
2 – Click the Profile link.
3 – Click Lists->Create a list.
4 – Give the list a name and, optionally, a description.
5 – Click the radio button next to Private.
6 – Click the Save List button.
When you add people to the list they won’t be notified because the list is private. So add whoever you want and they won’t know.
To make reading the tweets of these people easy I added a column to my TweetDeck installs. There are other ways to keep up with these lists too but this was the easiest for me since I already use TweetDeck on all the computers I use regularly.
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Batch File To Open Multiple Applications
Though an antiquated way of doing things I still use batch files occassionally. Most notably when I start work at the beginning of the day I always launch the same applications so I have a batch file to launch them. These batch files are set to launch an application then wait a specific amount of time before launching the next one. (The preference to wait between each application launches is because many of the machines I use are slow and I don’t want to overtax them by having several apps launching at the same time.) This isn’t particularly tough to do but on the occassions I need to set one up on a PC that I haven’t used before (such as a new or borrowed PC) I get a little confused about how to set them up the way I like them. So here’s how:
start /d “C:\path\to\application” executable.exe
sleep x
The start command tells windows to open a new window for the program we are about to launch. If we didn’t use this command then it would wait for the first application to close before launching the second one.
The /d switch tells the start command to use the path that follows it (“C:\path\to\application” in the above example) to launch the application (executable.exe in the example above). I know it’s a bit weird but that’s the way it works.
Next the sleep command tells windows to wait a specific number of seconds before moving on to the next line of the batch file (which in my case is another line that launches another application). If the sleep command doesn’t work on your machine you can get it by installing the Windows XP Service Pack 2 Support Tools.
Here’s a real life example:
start /d “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12” OUTLOOK.EXE
sleep 10
start /d “C:\Program Files\AIM” aim.exe
In this case the batch file will launch Outlook, wait 10 seconds, then launch AIM.
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Generating Root Short URLS From A YOURLS Subdirectory Install
With my increased use of Twitter I find myself tweeting links to articles quite often. But when space is limited to 120 characters and URLs are long one runs out of space to add the link quite easily. The standard way around this is to use an URL shortening service and post shortened URLs. I’ve used one of the more popular URL shorteners, bit.ly, for the last couple of years.
Though I was satisfied with bit.ly it always bothered me to be dependant on a service. What would happen to my links if the service went away? Or if their Libyan top level domain (.ly) was taken away? All my posted URLs would no longer work! So I made the decision a while ago to use my own URL shortener so I have complete control. And a couple of weeks ago I finally got around to implementing it.
The shortner I’m using is YOURLS. It was quite easy to install and is well documented in many other places (most notably, perhaps, on Lifehacker) so I won’t go into details about that process here.
Though getting started was simple I still had some issues. The most notable was based on my preference to segregate apps on my web space. I wanted all of the files from YOURLS to be placed in a subdirectory (so I wouldn’t accidentally remove required files from the root accidentally while cleaning up). But that lead to short URLs that included the subdirectory of the install. Who wants URLs like golddave.com/subdir/xxx? golddave.com/xxx is so much more convenient as it uses fewer characters.
The answer to this dilema was to change the .htaccess file in the root to add the following rewrite rule:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([0-9A-Za-z]+)/?$ /subdir/yourls-go.php?id=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^([0-9A-Za-z]+)\+/?$ /subdir/yourls-infos.php?id=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^([0-9A-Za-z]+)\+all/?$ /subdir/yourls-infos.php?id=$1&all=1 [L]
With this rule in place golddave.com/xxx would be the same as using golddave.com/subdir/xxx.
This is a nice, simple solution and works great but there’s still a problem. YOURLS still generated short URLs with the subdirectory so I had to manually edit the short URL before pasting it to where I wanted to use it. This annoyance would also affect URLs shortened by my Twitter client (which I had set up to use YOURLS as it’s URL shortener). (The instructions here are for Tweetdeck but are similar for other clients.)
This was an annoyance I didn’t want to deal with every time I wanted to post a link so I set about reviweing the YOURLS PHP code in the hopes of finding a way to have YOURLS generate short URLs with the subdirectory already removed. And I found it.
The real meat of YOURLS is functions.php which can be found in the includes directory of the YOURLS installation. I found that functions.php uses a setting from the YOURLS config file called YOURLS_SITE, to return the short URL of a given link and other various related functionality. (This setting is manually set when installing YOURLS.) I simply replaced YOURLS_SITE with a substring of YOURLS_SITE in all but two functions that use it (yourls_admin_url() and yourls_site_url() functions).
For our purposes let’s say that YOURLS_SITE is set to “http://example.com/subdir” (where “subdir” is the name of the directory where YOURLS is installed). Substitute the following code every time YOURLS_SITE is mentioned (except for the two functions mentioned at the end of the previous paragraph):
substr(YOURLS_SITE, 0, 18);
This essentially replaces “http://example.com/subdir” with “http://example.com” (the first 18 characters of “http://example.com/subdir”). The number 18 will be different depending on the length of your domain name (for instance, “http://golddave.com” is 19 characters so I used the number 19).
Now I have my YOURLS installation in it’s own subdirectory but am able to generate and use short URLs from the root.
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Microsoft Headed to NYC
Google Chrome under attack by critics. Operation payback cripples MasterCard site. Wikileaks cannot be stopped say the experts. Will Nokia jump to Android? Let’s hope so. No Windows 7 slates by year end. Meanwhile MSFT get huge government contract. Japan misses Venus with rocket. Bad math? Holiday shopping through the roof according to Comscore. NYC getting MSFT store.
Click to listen: [audio:http://m.podshow.com/media/12115/episodes/260277/tech5-260277-12-08-2010.mp3]
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Google Versus Amazon
Google does a demo and shows Chrome OS plus the new Android OS and other items. The company is also in a battle with Amazon over book sales. 4Chan goes after the Swiss bank and others who attack the Wikileaks folks. AT&T still the worst carrier after one day. Cityville now on Facebook. IE9 supposed to stop tracking. Oh really? Japan floating around Venus. Twitter worm using Goo.gl. And Verizon thinks it can use LTE for home Internet service? Har.
Click to listen: [audio:http://m.podshow.com/media/12115/episodes/260143/tech5-260143-12-07-2010.mp3]
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