Month: February 2007

Using Twitter as an Activity Log

I’ve seen a couple of articles about how to use Twitter for something beyond navel gazing. For example, LifeHack.Org has a few ideas for using Twitter.

Personally, I use Twitter to keep my activity log. I’ve seen a number of different apps for helping keep track of how much time you spend on this or that activity, but Twitter is dead simple and thanks to its IM/SMS features, it is also ubiquitous.

First, go to Twitter and sign up for an account. Second, follow the instructions to activate Twitter for your IM and cell phone. Then, as you go throughout your day, simply type in short updates about what activity you are working on at the moment.

I almost always access Twitter through IM, so when I get to my office I might spend an hour checking and responding to e-mail. I’ll just type in “checking e-mail” into my IM. Then when I switch to working on a project, I’ll just take a couple seconds to switch to the IM app and type “Working on Project X.”

Updating in this way through an IM client or via SMS takes almost no time at all and the result is a relatively fine grained look at how much time I spent working on various things throughout the day.

The one thing I don’t do, obviously, is actually share my Twitter activity with anyone (which isn’t a big loss since Twitter’s RSS features seem not to work anyway, at least with Google Reader).

I save the Twitter archive page on a weekly basis so I preserve that information permanently, and then delete all of the updates on Twitter so I’m keeping the amount of information actually stored on Twitter to a minimum.

Swords and Sandals 2

Someone had bookmarked Swords and Sandals 2 in Del.icio.us and I just had to check it out based solely on the title. After an hour or so, I had to force myself to stop playing because I had a deadline to meet. Oy.

This game is a lot like the recent update of Sid Meier’s Pirates. On the face of it, the game is rather silly and simplistic, but taken as a whole the result is an extremely compelling experience.

In Swords and Sandals you play a gladiator fighting one-off duels as well as tournaments. Its got a standard RPG setup with a bunch of stats that get increased when you level up, and the constant treadmill of earning gold from combats to buy gear to earn more gold to buy more gear, etc., etc.

The graphics are cartoony, the game is very one dimensional and struck me as a Flash version of something like Steve Jackson’s Advanced Melee. Nonetheless, I couldn’t stop playing. And playing. And playing.

A downloadable full version with loads of fighters to duel, tournaments to compete in, and more is only $19.99 or it can be played online at Playaholics with a Gold membership (which costs about $2.75 a month).

Tutorial for Adding OpenSearch via Google to Your Blog/Website

DeWitt Clinton has
a nice tutorial on adding an OpenSearch plug-in to your website.

OpenSearch is a search engine description standard supported by both Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 that makes it easy to customize the search engine. For example, if you’re using Firefox 2, you can left click on the down arrow next to the search box and see an option to “Add Brian.Carnell.Com”, which will give you the option of search this site from the search bar.

I’m not necessarily sure why you’d want to do so, but it’s there if you’re as obssessed with my life as I am.

The OpenSearch setup for this site uses the internal search engine, but Clinton’s tutorial shows how to set one up a Google search of just your site. But the example is easily modifiable to use your own blog or web site search engine.