Category: Social Media and the Web

Social media, blogging, tweeting, facebooking, web design, and all the stuff that isn’t here yet. Subcategories highlight some areas of particular expertise.

Call For Screenshots: Facebook Privacy Settings [en]

I’m giving a workshop on Wednesday to a group of teachers on Facebook privacy settings. Of course, Facebook changed their privacy settings in December, so I’m having to scramble to get up to speed before giving the workshop. This is why I’m asking for your help.

I was pointed to an article about the new settings, but I’m sure there are other good ones out there: 10 New Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know — please leave links to articles you found useful in the comments.

The main thing I’d like to as your help for is that I’d like a little collection of examples of privacy settings — mainly to help me understand what settings people are using, and possibly as examples to show at the workshop. I will anonymise any identifying information like e-mail addresses etc which might appear in the screenshots, no fear! Here are links to the various pages I’d love to receive screenshots of, if you have a few minutes to indulge me (e-mail firstname dot lastname at gmail — you know what my name is, don’t you?):

Don’t feel like you have to send me screenshots of all of these if you think it’s a lot — anything more than nothing is great for me. If you want to explain why you use certain settings, I’d love to hear about it too (in the comments or by e-mail).

A huge thanks to those of you who’ll take a few minutes to provide me with material!

Liking, Favoriting, Reblogging and Retweeting [en]

[fr] J'ai tendance à trouver que "like/reblog" (Tumblr) et "favorite/retweet" (Twitter) font un peu double emploi. Pas vous? Comment vous gérez ça?

I’m increasingly bothered by what I perceive as a kind of “double emploi” of “liking” vs. “re-ing” features. On Twitter, for example, you can favorite a tweet (see my favorites here) or retweet it (it ends up in your stream for your followers). On Tumblr, same thing: you can “like” posts (that seems to happen privately, though, I can’t find a public page collecting all my “likes”) or reblog them.

So, yes, there are slight differences in functionality. But overall, a pretty big overlap. Should I reblog or retweet something without favoriting or liking it first? I honestly tend to reblog and retweet and neglect the liking and favoriting (though now I’ve decided to feed my Twitter favorites into Digital Crumble, I’m favoriting too on Twitter).

I’d be interested to hear how others manage their likes, favorites, retweets and re-thingies. I expect I’m not the only one with overlap issues here.

Content Curation: Why I'm Not Your Target Audience [en]

[fr] Je suis trop efficace avec un moteur de recherche pour être très emballée par les divers outils qui visent à organiser la masse de contenu à disposition sur le web, en temps réel ou non.

In Paris, I had a sudden flash of insight (during a conversation with somebody, as often). Most services designed to help with content curation don’t immediately appeal to me because I’m not their target audience: I’m too good at using search.

I was trying to figure out why, although I liked the idea behind PearlTrees and SmallRivers (I tried them out both briefly), part of me kept thinking they weren’t really adding anything that we couldn’t already do. Well, maybe not that exactly, but I couldn’t really see the point. For example: “PearlTrees, it’s just bookmarking with pretty visual and social stuff, right?” or “SmallRivers, we already have hyperlinks, don’t we?” — I know this is unfair to both services, and they go beyond that, but somehow, for me, it just didn’t seem worth the effort.

And that’s the key bit: not worth the effort. When I need to find something I’ve seen before, I search for it. I understand how a search engine works (well, way more than your average user, let’s say) and am pretty good at using it. I gave up using bookmarks years ago (today, I barely use delicious anymore — just look at my posting frequency there). I stick things in Evernote and Tumblr because I can search for them easily afterwards. I don’t file my e-mail, or even tag it very well in gmail — I just search when I need a mail. I don’t organize files much on my hard drive either, save for some big drawers like “client xyz”, business, personal, admin — and those are horribly messy.

I search for stuff. And to be honest, now that I’ve discovered Google Web History, I’m not sure what else I could ever ask for. It embodies an old old fantasy of mine: being able to restrict a fulltext search to pages I’ve visited in a certain timeframe. “Damn, where did I put this?” becomes a non-issue when you can use Google search over a subset of the web which contains all the pages you’ve ever loaded up in your browser. (Yeah, privacy issues, certainly.)

What about the social dimension of these curation tools? Well, I’m a blogger. I blog. When I want to share, I put stuff in my blog, or Tumblr. I’m actually starting to like PearlTrees for that, because it is a nice way of collecting and ordering links — but really, I’m not the kind of person who has a lot of patience for that kind of activity. Some people spend time keeping their bookmarks, e-mails, or files in order. I don’t — there are way too many more interesting things for me to spend my time on. So I keep things in a mess, and when I need something out of them, I search.

I think I’m just not a content curator, aside from my low-energy activities like tweeting, tumblring, and blogging.

It doesn’t mean there is no need for content curation, of the live stream or more perennial content like “proper” web pages. But just like some people are bloggers and some aren’t, I think some people are curators and some aren’t.

Reading Online: Readability and Instapaper [en]

[fr] Deux outils à adopter si vous lisez beaucoup sur le web: Readability et Instapaper -- le premier pour rendre les textes lisibles, le deuxième pour créer une "pile de lecture".

Two tools you should learn to use and love if you like wandering around the web for interesting stuff to read: Readability and Instapaper.

Readability is a bookmarklet which reformats the main content on the page your reading, getting rid of the cruft and the way-too-small fonts to make the text comfortable for you to read. Before creating your bookmarklet, you can tweak the settings to your liking.

Instapaper also comes in bookmarklet form (and as an iPhone app) which allows you to “save for later reading”. When you feel like reading, head over to Instapaper.com and read all you like.

The combination of the two is just wonderful.

Je chronique, chronique [fr]

[en] I'm really enjoying writing my weekly column for Les Quotidiennes, and discovering that the constraints of the genre are giving me all sorts of ideas to write about.

Il y a un peu plus d’un mois, je démarrais mes chroniques du monde connecté pour Les Quotidiennes. J’avoue prendre beaucoup de plaisir à l’exercice.

Quand on pense à la créativité, on imagine que celle-ci s’exerce dans les champs du possible qui ne connaissent ni entraves ni limites. D’une certaine façon, ce n’est pas faux, mais la créativité, c’est surtout en présence des contraintes qu’elle se manifeste. Ce sont les contraintes, quand elles rentrent en friction avec les désirs et les objectifs, qui font jaillir la créativité.

Pourquoi ce discours sur la créativité? Parce que je suis en train de faire l’expérience, après bientôt dix ans d’écriture sur ce blog, qu’écrire dans un autre format, pour un autre lectorat, avec un agenda de publication fixe — bref, des contraintes — me donne un autre souffle. Le blog, tel que je le conçois, est un espace de liberté quasi absolu de mon écriture: j’écris quand je veux, sur ce que je veux, pour qui je veux, et aussi long ou court que je le désire.

Pour la chronique, par contre, c’est différent. Le public n’est pas le mien, c’est celui des Quotidiennes, pour commencer. J’ai un thème (relativement souple, certes) auquel me tenir. J’écris une chronique par semaine. Je vise une longueur et un type de discours “genre chronique”.

Et ce qui est dingue, c’est que ces contraintes me donnent l’idée d’écrire des choses que je ne penserais pas à écrire ici, sur Climb to the Stars — alors que je peux y écrire tout ce que je veux.

Vive les contraintes!

Du coup, je vous encourage à aller me lire là-bas. Pour vous faciliter la tâche, titres et liens vers les six chroniques déjà écrites.

Bonne lecture, feedback bienvenu!

I Hate FTP [en]

[fr] Je hais le FTP. Donnez-moi un accès SSH et screen sur le serveur, et me voilà heureuse.

Ever since I discovered the magical combination of SSH + screen, I have come to loathe FTP. Although some of you will cringe at the idea, I like working directly on the server. No stray copies lying around, dated I-don’t-know-what. No chance of mistakenly overwriting your last set of changes.

Screen is a terminal multiplexer (just learned the term). What you do, basically, is climb inside it when you’re on the server, and do everything from there. The advantage is that:

  • when you disconnect your SSH connection, screen keeps running, so your workspace is how you left it next time you come in
  • you can have multiple “screens” (ie, terminal windows) you can easily switch around, so you can have your IRC channel running in one screen, be editing a file in another, etc. (basically, multi-tasking like you would do with windows in a graphical environment).

I learnt shell commands as I went along. Those I use the most are:

  • wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip to download (instantly!) the latest version of WordPress directly on the server
  • unzip latest.zip to unzip it, still directly on the server
  • mv wp old-200910 to archive an old installation of wordpress (or move other files around)
  • cp -Rf plugins/* ../../wordpress/wp-content/plugins/ to copy all my plugins to the freshly unzipped install of WordPress
  • nano wp-config-sample.php to add my settings to the file and save it as wp-config.php

These are just a few examples. Once you know these commands and have them at the tip of your fingers, how fast you work is only limited by how fast you can type them. And you’re doing things directly on the web server. You’re not stuck looking at the “real world” (= the server) through the imperfect lens of an FTP client, waiting for uploads to happen (or downloads), paying attention not to overwrite stuff, having everything ready on your computer before pressing the magic button and hoping everything will be all right, because otherwise you’re in for another bout of download, edit, upload…

Some of my clients have WordPress installations on servers with no shell access. Obviously, I don’t have as much practice doing things the FTP way, but I swear it takes me 5 times as much time to do things with no SSH access. When you know how to use it, the command-line is wickedly fast.

The only situation where I actually do like FTP is when I’m using CSSEdit, because coupled to an FTP client, I can be editing my CSS file with the added power of the programme on my Mac, and have it upload and update the file on the server each time I hit save. Because yes, it’s nicer to write CSS in CSSEdit than in nano.

But for managing files and moving them around and minor edits… I’m much happier sitting on my server inside my screen.

Bloguer en français ou en anglais? [fr]

[en] I write a weekly column for Les Quotidiennes, which I republish here on CTTS for safekeeping.

Chroniques du monde connecté: cet article a été initialement publié dans Les Quotidiennes (voir l’original).

Les blogueurs qui se lancent se demandent souvent dans quelle langue il vaut mieux bloguer, pour autant qu’il en aient plus d’une à disposition. Dans notre région, le choix à faire est généralement entre le français, langue maternelle, et l’anglais, langue internationale.

On se dit que bloguer en anglais permettra de toucher un plus grand public.

Parce que oui, bloguer, c’est en général pour être lu. On cherche un peu de reconnaissance, ou à établir son expertise dans un domaine qui nous passionne. Alors bien sûr, c’est légitime, on veut mettre toutes les chances de notre côté. Et on se demande à juste titre dans quelle langue écrire.

En fait, écrire en anglais est probablement une fausse bonne idée, surtout si l’on ne cherche pas à tout prix à atteindre un public international: plus la mare est grande, plus il y a de gros poissons dedans. La concurrence sera plus rude dans une langue majoritaire que dans une langue minoritaire. Plus facile, donc, de faire son trou dans une langue qui n’est pas déjà saturée de blogs sur le sujet qui nous tient à coeur, particulièrement si l’on est plus habile avec.

Le blogueur, même populaire, n’atteindra toujours qu’une infime fraction des lecteurs potentiels dans la langue qu’il utilise. Ce n’est pas la taille de la mare qui est le facteur limitant, mais bien le nombre de poissons qui nagent dedans.

Reste qu’on peut toujours décider de rejeter les frontières linguistiques en mélangeant plusieurs langues sur un blog… mais ça c’est une autre histoire

Agenda: La conférence internationale Lift, portant sur des sujets mêlant technologie et société, et qui a lieu chaque année a Genève (5-7 mai 2010) offre jusqu’au 26 décembre son billet d’entrée à moitié prix. Ne manquez pas de vous y inscrire sans tarder si ce thème vous interpelle.

WPML to Make Your WordPress Site Multilingual [en]

[fr] A tester absolument si vous devez mettre en place un site multilingue: le plugin WPML pour WordPress.

I’ve been wanting to play with the WPML WordPress plugin for a while now, and I finally took the plunge today and updated my professional site to the latest version of WordPress, as well as WPML. (Sadly, the content still needs a major overhaul.)

Until now, I had built it using two separate WordPress installations, one in English, one in French, linked together by my quick-and-dirty plugin Bunny’s Language Linker (which, in the light of today’s experiment, I will be retiring from rather inactive development — Basic Bilingual remains, though, and still very much makes sense).

Here’s a summary of what I did:

  • backed up my database
  • upgraded both WordPress blogs to the latest version and exported their content
  • removed the automatic language redirection based on browser language preferences to make sure it wouldn’t interfere (I want to find a way to insert it back in, help appreciated)
  • added and activated the WPML plugin on the English installation
  • went through the settings after activating advanced mode
  • translated widget text and site tagline
  • manually imported content from the French site (import failed due to PHP on my server not being compiled with ctype_digit()), but it was only a dozen pages — it’s easy to specify language and of which English page a new one is a translation of, if any)

Setting up WPML

I did encounter some grief:

  • when selecting the “different languages in directories” I kept getting an error message which didn’t make much sense to me; tip: if that happens, make sure that your site and pages all work fine (in my case, I had to reset permalink structure because it had got lost somewhere on the way — even though the settings didn’t change)
  • I’m using a theme with an existing .mo file for French, so I selected that option (to figure out what the textdomain is, look through a theme file to see what the second argument to the gettext calls is — they look like __("Text here", "text domain here")) but it seems that all the strings for my theme still appear in the “string translation” pane
  • initially the strings for my widgets and site tagline weren’t appearing in the “string translation” pane — you have to click the “Save options and rescan strings” button for that, even if you haven’t changed any settings (that was not exactly obvious to me)

Here’s what I still need to fix:

  • the rewrite rules are set to hide the “language directory” part of the URL when browsing the site in the default language — I want to change this as explained in this forum post
  • reimplement automatic language detection
  • set up a custom language switcher that looks more like “Français | English” somewhere at the top right of the page

And honestly, once that is settle, WPML is as close as it gets to my dream multilingual plugin for WordPress!

Get Your Lift10 Ticket Half-Price Before Christmas [en]

[fr] Vous savez certainement que Lift, à Genève (5-7 mai 2010) est un des événements incontournables du milieu de la technologie en Europe. Une conférence non-commerciale, qui vous donnera matière à penser pour l'année à venir et ouvrira des portes dans votre tête dont vous ignoriez l'existence jusqu'ici. Trois jours pour 650.- (220.- par jour!) si vous vous inscrivez avant le 26 décembre. (Comparez ça aux tarifs des formations usuelles, et vous avez un prix imbattable pour du contenu inégalable.)

The reasons I gave for attending Lift nearly two years ago are still very much true. In all honesty, if there is one European tech event you should absolutely attend each year, it’s the Lift Conference in Geneva. This year, unlike the previous ones, it will take place in May (5-7th) — much nicer weather than February!

Lift10 conference in Geneva, May 5-7, 2010. In a nutshell, Lift is 3 days of extraordinary speakers you have not heard before a dozen times already, a very diverse gathering of smart and interesting attendees, various presentation formats in addition to keynotes like discussions, workshops, open stage presentations (part of the programme is community-contributed), rich hallway conversations, and a very uncommercial feel to it all.

But don’t stop there, please do read my post from two years ago, then come back. I’ve attended the conference since it started, so you might want to read some of my posts covering it (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009) — and all the videos of past talks are available freely online.

Another thing that has changed since last year besides the date is the conference pricing, which has gone up significantly for those who do not register early. Laurent wrote a really great post about the challenges encountered in pricing an event like Lift, which tries to attract attendees with different profiles and very different budgets: be too expensive, and people without an employer behind them to pay for the ticket can’t come — but be too cheap, and you’re not taken seriously (which tends to be the problem Lift has faced over the years).

Actually, anybody who provides services to a client base which is not homogeneous are faced with this dilemma, which is one of the reasons my rates (for example) vary according to which client I’m providing services to — shocking thought it may seem to some (upcoming blog post about that, by the way).

So, the good news is that if you have your ears and eyes open, and know that you’re going to Lift in 2010, you can get in for 650.- CHF (50% of the final ticket price) if you register before December 26th.

Students can apply to get one of the 20 free tickets that are reserved for them (deadline January 15th).

Journalists and bloggers should apply for a media pass.

I really hope to see you at Lift. You won’t regret it.