• September 30th, 2008
• Filed in
  • Web Development
  • Work

These are exciting times. Halloween is my favorite holiday, not because I like blood and guts or horror movies or scaring people. It’s when the companies I do work for make $$$$$$. Plus, it’s a fun holiday to just let loose, relax and have fun. Who doesn’t like a costume party? Although the days of throwing parties has passed, I still eagerly anticipate the holiday. I honed my skills as a web developer on a few big Halloween sites.

October pwns. The climate cools to the point where it’s actually enjoyable, leaves turn here in New England, baseball playoffs, and Halloween to name a bit of awesomeness. The lovely October holiday has kept a roof over my head since I graduated from WPI, minus a short stint distracting tweens.

On the eve of October, it’s worth mentioning that if you work with websites that spike ginormously in a short amount of time that up-time is critical. Each minute of downtime can have huge revenue ramifications.

At Fright Catalog I employed a free way of instantly being alerted via txt message if any of our sites were struggling.

Montastic

Montastic is a free service that will constantly ping your domain and alert you via email when there is a problem. It’s rock solid and it just works.

Send a text to my iPhone

It took a bit of research to figure out which email address on AT&T worked with my iPhone but after testing out a few:

• phone#@mmode.com
• phone#@txt.att.com
• phone#@mms.att.com
• phone#@cingularme.com – works, but on it’s way out

I finally found a winner: phone#@txt.att.net (Thanks to Ryan for the update)

It’s not sexy but it will work as an email address that when emailed will send an MMS message to your iPhone.

I’ve seen the recently popular downforeveryoneorjustme.com advertise uptimeparty.com. They’ll let you monitor 1 site for free, but otherwise you pay. Montastic does the same job and it’s free, so it makes a great alternative.

Montastic has helped me sleep easy many-a-night if we hit some up-time snags earlier that day. It could easily be used for your own personal blog as well.

• April 1st, 2008
• Filed in
  • Blog
  • Shameless Promotion
  • Work

Recently I blogged about Controlling Your Online Persona which was the inspiration for this method I’m employing for aggregating my tweets across multiple Twitter accounts.

Recently I’ve been using Twitter more and more. What was initially an annoyance of a service (first time I saw a tweet about having to take a deuce I checked out) has become my office water cooler from my virtual home office where I spend my days toiling away working on the pipes of the interwebs.

Initially when I signed up for Twitter back in March of 2007 I chose a different moniker “ky“ because the big thing about Twitter was that you could use it on your cell with SMS. I figured if people were going to txt me via twitter that “ky” would be a hell of a lot easier to type than “somedirection” so I went with it.

I think Twitter as a service is starting to catch on – even Obama has 2 channels: BarackObama and ObamaNews. Seeing that use of twitter was probably the first time I thought – hey Twitter is mainstream. Obama is using technology in his campaign exceptionally well I might add. But I digress..

I realized recently that I don’t want to be boxed into the “ky” username. It’s nice to have and people recognize me (once they see my avatar) but it’s not me, it’s not my brand. So I went about changing this and stumbled upon the realization that Twitter actually handles for multiple Twitter personas quite nicely.

The Primary User Method on Twitter

1. You need a unique email address for each name
2. Choose 1 handle as your master account from which you’ll send all updates. For me I’m going to stick with ky because it’s what I started with and I have a handful of followers.
3. Create your other usernames. For my purposes I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t lose somedirection, nor did I want one of my clones to snatch KyleBradsaw from my grasp.
4. Now here’s how you can funnel people into your primary username. For myself I have just 1 tweet for both users somedirection and KyleBradshaw “DBA @ky”. This will give the surfer a link directly to my primary account while also letting them know that the account they’re looking at isn’t where I update.
5. Now ONLY follow your primary account from your alternate(s). Every time you twitter under your primary account and some one visits one of your alternate handles, when they look under the “With Others” tab they will see all of your primary holders’ tweets!

Each user can have it’s own style. I like having a couple of different looks across all of my users.

Initially I was thinking I’d have to kill off ky goodnesss for somedirection to keep my brand in tact, but this is a suitable workaround and I can have the best of both worlds. While I was at it I also grabbed KyleBradshaw for good measure. If Twitter becomes popular like myspace or gmail I’ll be glad I did.