milos topic

Ever since I got an iPhone as a birthday present (thank you Courtney!) in July of this year I have been using Twitterrific as the Twitter app of choice. At that time, it was one of the first apps to market and it worked fairly well. Plus, it’s FREE!

However, over the past several weeks the application started crashing, being slow and at times fairly annoying to use so I started my Google search quest for a better alternative. Last night, I came across a post among my RSS feeds (a bit behind on those as you can tell) from Yoast.com (btw, a great resource for WordPress plugins and tweaks) that suggested TwitterFon as an alternative.

I gave it a try and absolutely love it! Great app, responsive, allows fast scrolling and it doesn’t freeze (unlike the above mentioned app), it allows you to see your “Friends” (time line), @ replies and direct messages. You can even search from the app as well as look up the people you are following (no need to remember their @cRaZyunIquEnaMe nomenclature). Also, FREE!

Now, if I could only find a good Plurk app…any suggestions?

As I look through the sea of WordPress plugins to test and potentially add to this blog in order make my life easier, generate more useful data and make it more interesting for visitors I’ve realized that this could turn into a fairly complicated process. Considering that the number of plugins keeps growing almost daily there are several things one should consider when selecting a plugin:

Here are some of the plugins I use (alphabetical order):

The above listed plugins are in use now with another 5 or 6 currently in testing. You have seen my favorites, now it’s time for you share your favorite plugins.

How do you decide on a plugin, how do you determine that it is valuable to you? What are your favorite/must have plugins and why? Please share them and I will compile a list for everyone to see and will take a look at them myself.

I normally try not to rant online too much as it is really pointless and generally counterproductive. We have all experienced poor customer service, long waits and rude representatives, but at times certain behavior exceeds all stupidity. This is one of those times.

Today, at 12:30 PM I have tried to log into an Aetna account and wasn’t able to so. The login fields are visible and available on their homepage, but once the info is inputted, I would be transferred to the above displayed page. Now, 12:30 pm GMT-5 (or EST if you prefer) is right in the middle of a work day here on east coast; it is also 9:30 AM GMT-8 (or PST) on west coast (meaning people are already at work) and even if you were somewhere in Europe, London for example it would be 5:30 PM GMT(0) which also means that people would need to have access to their system during that time.

Dealing with servers, databases and web front ends myself I can appreciate that at times things happen and go wrong without notice, but the way this situation is handled is what makes it bad and a bit surprising for a company of that size. Even now, an hour later, there is no update on their site informing clients that the system is inaccessible; the login fields are still visible (even though they don’t let you login) and their tech support sucks! I called them as instructed by their page and was given an attitude and nonsense answers.

Here’s a brief exchange I had with one of their techs/customer disservice reps:

Me: I can’t login to my account on your website and was instructed to call you.
Tech: Yes, the system is updating itself.

Me: Updating itself, as in on its own, just decided to do so in the middle of a business day?
Tech: Yes. It’s strange, it normally doesn’t do this, but I guess it decided to pick a different time today.

Me: So your system is not experiencing any technical difficulties, it simply decided to update itself?
Tech: Yeah, I know it’s weird, but nothing we can do about it, it just started updating itself.

At this point, I’m clear that I’m dealing with a moron, but have decided to ask another question or two. Btw, she was dead serious while providing those answers.

Me: Do you know how long it will take for it to update itself?
Tech: It normally takes anywhere from an hour to two, but not sure. Try logging in in a couple of hours and if it doesn’t work I guess it’s not done yet.

Me: Thanks! You might want to post a note on you site informing visitors of this change.
Tech: Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. Is there anything else I can assist you with today?

Me: No, thanks! You have done enough already.
Tech: I’m glad I was able to help you. Have a great day.

Furthermore, besides the technical “expertise” I’m starting to wonder what kind of system are medical records and personal information stored on if they can’t provide something as simple as a failover or any kind of redundancy for their customer information system.

I still have to call them back, but I refuse to do so just yet, I need some more “down time” first.

I changed my Twitter background and in order for me to “peek” to the left of the Twitter time line resolution suffered. It’s not my best photo editing work, but it’s good enough for my first attempt.

Here’s the full resolution JPG file in case you want to tweak it for your own background.

Several people I “follow” on Twitter have recommended Intersquash as a website that can make your site iPhone friendly. The process is simple and at the end of it your site (when viewed on an iPhone) will look something like this:

As you can see, your site will get the “famous” iPhone gray look. You can even add an iPhone icon (size: 57 x 57 pixels; format: .png, .jpg) during this process.

All you have to do is provide your website’s/blog’s RSS feed, name the site, add an icon, and then add the generated JavaScript code inside the “head” tags of your site. Here’s the code generated for this blog:

I tested it, looks good, but have decided to take the code out and here’s why:

Overall it is a cool service and I’m sure will be quite useful to many people. Try it and let me know what you think. So far, I’m back to my “as is” look.

Over the past month or so I have been asked to review some 4 or 5 services/websites/products and have to say that I have enjoyed doing it. All of these have been in either their beta or pre-release stages. A couple of them are very cool ideas and hopefully they will be able to position themselves properly and gain decent market share by providing something new and original.

If you would like me to take a look at something you are working on and are planning on unleashing onto the world, let me know. All reviews are confidential unless you want me to talk about them publicly. Also, please note that the only prerequisite is that the product/service/website has already had some time spent on and is in a functional stage. I would love to help earlier in the process, but I don’t have enough time to provide free, unbiased reviews in the early repetitive stages.

My reviews come from three different perspectives (in no particular order):

I’ll take the time necessary for proper review and will provide my input as requested. Please note that since I have no direct (personal) involvement/interest in your company/idea you will get both good and bad, I will call it like I see it. Don’t take it personally.

Furthermore, if you are one of the people I have already provided input for and would like me to share that info here please let me know and I will gladly help you promote your idea (as long as I didn’t hate it).

Here’s the video I mentioned of Gary Vaynerchuk breaking it down yesterday at a Mashable sponsored event. They were outside as you can see, which wasn’t planned, but they still went ahead and made it happen. Perfect example of how to improvise, be creative and deliver.

This event was promoted through Facebook and Twitter among other services. Btw, if you don’t know who Gary is, please go to his site and read about him or watch some of his videos. He’s a rock star of social media, a vino connoisseur (Host of Wine Library TV) and a very cool guy.

If you are passionate about something and enjoy doing it, nothing around it should be difficult.

#votereport voted in #07442 and it was all smooth like butter. #wait 1 minute.

That was the message I sent to Twitter Vote Report this morning as soon as I was done casting my vote and it made me think a bit more about this election. Not just how it is different from all the previous ones for the obvious reasons, things that are at stake, our current international and economic position, race and gender of the candidates and their running mates. Furthermore, it is also significantly different in how it is covered and how people get involved, what tools they use to get their voice out, share their experiences, opinions, concerns and reservations about the candidates and the entire election process.

Starting from the candidates themselves, they have built a significant online presence and marketing avenues which have been used for months to get their messages out. On the other hand, people are talking about politics, the election and future of the U.S. online, on their social networking sites and services.

Some of many (way too many to list here) examples of how people share their election experiences, political views and ideas online:

People are using Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, MySpace, and many other online services and websites to promote their views and support their candidate of choice. This is something new and I am sure will continue to expand and grow into even a bigger force in 2012 election.

I love the fact that people now have more power and opportunity to get independent information and news from other voters instead of simply being fed information from media conglomerates often controlled by people heavily invested in politics with their own personal agendas.

Please share what you have to say, someone out there will listen!

Over the past several weeks I have experienced intermittent audio issues playing Flash content in Firefox 3. I’m running 32-bit Vista Enterprise SP1 and have tried all the usual “suspects”…reinstalled Firefox; updated/reinstalled the Shockwave Flash plugin; checked permissions on some of my site/script blocking add-ons, but the loss of audio remained intermittent. Then I did an online search for this issue and some people recommended going to Tools –> Add-ons –> Plugins and disabling, then enabling the plugin itself. This seemed to work momentarily, but days later (especially after updating the plugin to the latest version) problems came back. As you can imagine, this was getting annoying.

At that point, I decided to look at the OS side of sound control (don’t ask why I didn’t do this first) and found that for some crazy reason Firefox was muted in the Vista volume mixer. I turned the volume up and it’s been working ever since. I can’t believe that the problem was caused by something so simple which I should have looked at initially.

It’s time! Seriously, it is time for me to get an E-ZPass again. Yes, again, I broke the first one and it’s not a story I would want to get back to as to how it happened…let’s just say it was years ago, when I was a bit more temperamental. For those of you that do know the story, please keep it to yourselves…shhhhhh!

As I was saying, the need for an E-ZPass has been increasing recently and it doesn’t look to be going away any time soon so I figured I would go to their web site and sign up. First impression of the website wasn’t that good, from color scheme to sharp corners to unused space (although it does have some CSS resizing happening), but who cares it’s not my site, all I need is their product/service, right? Right!
But then, I looked at the URL bar and was momentarily confused by their favicon (an old Netscape logo, really?). Why is it there?

Not really up to me evaluate their site, but I think that a company that generates so much revenue and visibility should have a much better web presence.

To end on a positive note, their application submission form travels over HTTPS.