I think secretly, deep down, everybody wants a microblogging service. Lets face it, Twitter is awesome or have you forgotten about this bad boy. So now, I’ll stop plugging my blog in order to plug my brand new microblog: Travis Fantina Ramblings.
It all began reading over last month’s Dreamhost newsletter. They mentioned a wonderful new microblogging software called status.net. Licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License. So I looked up Dreamhost’s own Pet Status It’s basically Twitter for your server which got me excited because as I stated earlier everybody wants their own microblogging service.
So I’m pleased to introduce Travis Fantina Ramblings a brand new microblogging service that’s free to join and offers ten more characters per post then Twitter! It’s a counter part to this Ramblings blog, now instead of only me EVERYBODY gets to ramble. It’s not very useful, but it’s on my server now and I’m probably too lazy to ever remove it check it out, join up and start microblogging who knows we might even have the next Twitter on our hands (but I doubt it). It’s a fun little experiment and a way for me to waste more time.

Now you may be wondering, Travis, where the heck have you been? No hide nor hair of a blog post since December. The answer is simple, I’ve been fairly busy and the majority of my ‘public thoughts’ (those are thoughts that I deem worthy to post online) are not long enough to blog about. You’ll notice that my Twitter account is regularly Tweeting and my new Ramblings account will soon begin rambling regularly. If anybody finds a plugin that allows me to merge these accounts I would love you forever.

Seriously, I do miss blogging regularly. I missed the ‘Avatar’ craze (but if your wondering I liked it a lot), and there are several other reviews I meant to post but just never did: let me just say go see ‘Sherlock Holmes’ and ‘The Lovely Bones’ RIGHT NOW! Anyway I’m probably going to see both ‘Green Zone’ and ‘Alice in Wonderland’ this week I’ll try to post a review. I promise I’ll get back to regular blog updates (for those of you still not tweeting with the twits).

For now, check out Ramblings: The Microblog

written by Travis \\ tags: blog, fantina, Microblogging, Ramblings, Reviews, Status.net, travis, Twitter

This post is a continuation of Saturday’s which can be found here I recommend reading it first.

Ok so continuing where I left off Saturday night (Sunday morning technically)..

Twitter has a few neat ways to contact people, if you are “Friends” with someone (meaning you are both following each other) you can send that person a “Direct Message” which will only be visible to them. You can mention somebody by typing the @ sign and then their name (like @tfantina), this tweet will be visible to everybody who follows you and the person you mention will also be notified even if they don’t follow you. The highest complement you can give on Twitter is a re-tweet. If you like somebody’s tweet and want to show it to your followers just type “RT” then mention the person and paste their tweet ( “RT @tfantina ‘Some how I always cross the border during rush hour.’”).

So far I’ve covered the basics of Twitter, however it’s much more fun once you start checking the amazing apps that have sprung up around Twitter.

Some people will tell you to download a desktop app for Twitter like
“Tweetie” or “TweetDeck” however I don’t use either of these, however if you are tweeting from a smart phone or an iPod Touch I recommend getting an app for it. When it comes to apps here is a list of ones that I could not live without (this is relative we are talking about a micro blogging service);

Brizzley is a fun app that displays pictures and video in tweets (usually you have to click a link to see them), among other things it also allows you to organize people you follow into lists. I highly recommend it, it’s currently in beta however if you want an invite just drop a line in the comments and I’ll hook you up first come first serve.

Tinyurl is good when you have a super long URL that you have to fit into 140 characters or less (they usually shorten any URL to about 30 characters).

Twitpic allows you to post photos to Twitter from you cell phone or the web.

Tweetstats is cool if your geeky like me and want to know the statistics of your tweets (time of day you tweet the most, day of week you tweet the most, where most of your tweets come from, ect.).

There are hundreds of cool apps for Twitter, a good place to start looking is Oneforty.com they have organized most of the major apps for you to try, rate and review.

Sorry it took so long, Twitter’s a bit of a hard sell at first but I take it with a grain of salt and appreciate all the neat apps and trends.

Image: Pasquale D’Silva courtesy of Function

written by Travis \\ tags: blog, Micro-blogging, Re-tweet, topics, trends, Twitter

Ok when I say ‘Our’ I actually mean ‘my’ but you get the idea.  Anyway just to let you know what happened to the blog I was messing around with the ‘Phoenixblue’ theme and I messed up the footer which intern messed up the header  (go figure) so now it looks kind of like  Web 2.0 alphabet soup.  So I threw this default Wordpress theme up there until I can fix Phoenixblue which should take a few days (hopefully).

January 12th update, sorry, I have been quite busy with behindthefilms.net as well as a large editing project.  I have not had time to work on this and I don’t think I will for possibly the next two weeks.  In the mean time I will keep posting in this template .

January 17th update- well I re-installed the theme then copied my old modified style-sheet  into it- worked fine.  Copied my header code in and that’s when it broke, so the problem is with my header or with the CSS code that makes the header tick, I’m so tired I can hardly thing so I will continue working on this on monday.  Good night!

January 27th update- well I got the Phoenix Blue theme back to normal- I still need to apply the website’s style to it but that will have to wait.

Ok well it’s all fixed when I get some time over the next few months I will be making some small changes (hopefully without breaking anything). But at least it looks like the rest of the site.

Sorry,

Travis

written by Travis \\ tags: blog, Oops, Phoenixblue, Problems, travis, website

Yay, I have finally officially finished the website!  On Friday I finished all the design elements but it was just tonight I installed this blog on the server and transfered all my old posts from nufichicken.com

So now that the design, layout, and navigation are up working and nobody’s reported any bugs.  I will have to add some content.  I have a short film ready to go up in the ‘movies’ page, and I am going to be converting the rest of those films from Youtube to a generic player provided by Dreamhost.

In other news, I had a corporate shoot a few miles from Niagara today.  It was about an 8 hour shoot but we were fed very well and despite the fact that I was busy filming I still was able to watch the speakers (that’s why they give cameras eye pieces). 

written by Travis \\ tags: blog, camera, corporate shoot, finished, Niagara, website