This blog is rolling into its second year since when I started it. That's great. I know many blogs out there which started at the same time but are practically dead right now.

Taking Stock

How has been the year really? Well, this one is the most interesting; the "How to Create a Microblog Using Buddypress" post, which I posted early this year was the most popular post on this blog for some months this year. That comes with this reality; that it is the post that brought in the most traffic to this site. The funny thing is that I had been postponing posting the entry from last year ;-|. Then the "Tweeting on the Nokia X2-01?" post overtook the Buddypress post around November in popularity (thanks to this blog's Indian audience). ;-)

The microblogging communities on the other hand, have not been inactive albeit local guys are not really into them [why?]. And they get some traffic from searches for StatusNet according to the Alexa ranking too.

Happy Holidays

To close off this year, let's get into the Christmas holiday groove. Enjoy your Christmas but be cautious. And lets not forget the religious background of this season. Merry Christmas.

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Blogging is tough, especially if you do not have the writer's streak. I am not saying that one can't learn how to be a prolific writer. I am actually pointing to to those who write occasionally or erratically. Their output is usually low. Some not only have fewer posts but heir posts may be very short. So what do we have in the long run? A neglected blog. Publishing new articles on a regular basis is almost a requirement in the blogosphere. It's a fact that a blog's homepage design - where the latest post is always at the top of the page - can expose a blogger's activity quite easily, without even the user digging into the site's archives.
On the other hand, microblogging does not require as much input from the user in terms of the time spent on thinking of what to post. You can simply post anything, even non-sensical posts such as:



ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.


Idle babble occupies a sizable proportion of all posts on Twitter. Disclaimer: Microblogging cannot replace blogging. But it does help whenever you get the writer's block. Furthermore, no single person can generate a good article every hour of their working days :-).

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I came to learn about this app from an article on The Next Web. Quite interesting. If you got one really heavy Twitter "followee" like @YESUmob, well, this is the app you need. Actually, using it does not shut out such subscriptions from your stream. What Shuush does is that it "promotes" (lacked a better word here) your least active subscriptions. You know those tweeps you follow who tweet very little. With Shuush, tweets from these tweeps get to be prominently displayed on your timeline. :-)

How do you pronounce this?

Like the typical African I am, I'll pronounce it as "SH-OO-SH" just like the literal pronunciation of "Shish" from Tahidi High. But that may be wrong really. Let us try some deduction here. Taking the English word "hush" which is clearly related to silencing someone, then we can place its pronunciation as "SH-HUSH". Right?

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UPDATE: StatusNet Cloud Service is now running on the latest release of the script, 1.0beta. One new change that they have introduced into the service is that no free, public, microblogging communities can be created. See this post on the forums. Did I just tweet about it?


This is just a continuation of the previous post on the improvements on the StatusNet microblogging script.

Themes/Templates

In so many cases be it Internetware apps or any other kind of app, form has equal importance to the substance of the program/script. A site's or an app's appearance can make or break the attraction of users.
Previous releases of the script had 7 pre-installed themes: Pigeon Thoughts, Biz, Identica, Mozillaca, default, Cloudy and hack3r themes. But starting from the 0.9.6 release, 6 more themes have added: Clean, Cleaner, Rebase, Victorian, Mnml & Shiny themes. These new themes are much more crisp and glossy than some of the older pre-installed themes. As proof of the "wow-factor" these new templates have, check out the Mannconnect microblog with the Shiny theme. Cool, isn't it?
Oops, I almost forgot this. The navigation bars have also been updated too. There are some new additions to the navigation bars: the "Home" link/tab that points to a user's private timeline and the "Private" link/tab that points to a user's profile. The "Public" link/tab points to the public timeline's page.

Mobile Layout

The mobile Web is the in thing nowadays.Websites, more so social networking sites, that cannot be viewed from mobile devices are losing a critical portion of Internet users. The StatusNet devs have now included an option to convert a microblog's layout to a layout that is "mobile-friendly" - if I can say that. With a simple click on a link, you can change a StatusNet microblog's layout to its mobile layout. Just click on the "Switch to Mobile Layout" link that is right at the footer section of the site and you'll have your site on every iPod, mobile phone.... Good day!

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