Day: February 20, 2009

Magnolia Loses All User Data

Personally, this is why I run my own web services using open source packages rather than trust free services for long-term storage of information (short-term usage is inevitable, but get that stuff off and onto a server you control and ensure it can be backed up ASAP).

The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia reports that all of its user data was irretrievably lost in the Jan. 30 database crash that knocked the service offline. That means that users who were unable to recover their bookmarks through publicly available tools (including other social media sites and the Google cache) have lost all their data.

. . .

It turns out that Ma.gnolia was pretty much a one-man operation, running on two Mac OS X servers and four Mac minis. A clear lesson for users is not to assume that online services have lots of staff, lots of servers and professional backups, and to keep your own copies of your data, especially on free services.

VibraLite Watch

VibraLITE 8I am not a watch wearer — haven’t really worn a watch for like 10+ years. The past few days, though, I’ve been wearing a VibraLite 8 watch I ordered off of Amazon and am very happy with it.

Of course I’m not actually using it for anything as mundane as telling time — in fact, I haven’t even bothered to set the correct time on it yet. Instead I’m using it for time management.

Of all the watches I looked at, the VibraLite seems to be one of the few that can set countdown alarms and then trigger a vibration alert at the end of the alarm (rather than annoying everyone around me with stupid beeping). Typically I like to work in 15 to 30 minute segments on projects. So I can set a countdown timer for 15 minutes, and the VibraLite will vibrate at 10, 5 and of course when the timer reaches zero (I could turn off the 10 minute and 5 minute reminders if I wanted to, but they do help me keep on task).

It’s got a bunch of other features that I don’t care about and haven’t investigated. And, of course, as you can tell from the picture, this has “nerd watch” written in exclamations all over it. If style is your main concern in a watch, run away from this as fast as you can.

But this is the perfect watch for the ADHD set.

Twitter Tools WordPress Plugin

Alex King has released v1.6 of his Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress. The plugin has a pretty thorough featureset for integrating Twitter into your WordPress blog, including,

  • Download and archive your tweets from Twitter.
  • Show your recent tweets in a sidebar widget.
  • Create a blog post from each of your tweets (you can set the category, author, tags, etc.).
  • Create a daily digest from your tweets.
  • Create a weekly digest from your tweets.
  • Create a tweet on Twitter when you post to your blog (optional on a per-post basis).
  • Create tweets on Twitter from your blog sidebar and/or admin interface.
  • Auto-link @replies and provide “in reply to” links.
  • Auto-link hashtags.
  • Ability to exclude @replies from sidebars, blog posts and digests.
  • Supports URL shortening services via standard WordPress filter (read the README).
  • Supports WP Chunk for URL shortening URLs in tweets when they are shown in your blog posts and/or sidebar.