Category: Twitter

#Earthhour on Twitter

If you were around on twitter last night just before 8.30 you would’ve seen me panicking as I’d forgotten about Earth Hour. As a result, it was a quick sprint around the house to turn off all of the lights!  This was the 3rd year I’d participated in Earth Hour but the first two times I was much better prepared.

However, this time I was stumbling around the house in the dark trying to find a light source, which involved rummaging around under my bed.  I nearly ended up with a vibrator strapped to my head but eventually I found this:

Phew! Now I could sit back, drink wine and enjoy Earth Hour with my mates on Twitter.

I’ve just been doing a bit of reading as I was curious how much energy earth hour saved. Apparently, online applications (e.g. Twitter/Facebook) used during Earth Hour actually used more energy than saved by turning the lights out. Eeek! The organisers were encouraging people to post messages and photos on social network sites and if you were on Twitter you would have seen a hive of activity around it.

I felt a bit silly after reading this, but in the end I guess it’s all about awareness. So, if millions of us were tweeting about it then it was worth it!

Tweetup with a Difference

Me and my big Gob!  You’d think I would have learned by now.  I don’t know how many times I’ve agreed to do things under the influence.  So far, I’ve done three ½ marathons, Skydiving, Bungee Jumping, the Moonwalk, accepted a marriage proposal and conceived!  This time I’ve managed to get tangled up in doing the Gower Challenge, in South Wales on behalf of Breast Cancer Awareness.

It’s going to be a Tweet Up with a difference.  I’ll be doing a 22 mile coastal walk with @chickenruby, @pennynash, @beachhut81 and @Gawnee in June, now known as the #twitsfortits. All amazing people and its great cause so I’m up for it!  We’re all doing it for different reasons and I’m looking forward to them sharing their stories.

I appreciate in the current climate that people aren’t in a position to donate a lot but I’ve worked out that we have over 3700 followers between us, so if you all donate 20p we should make our target.  We would be most grateful.  You can donate here and you can also follow our progress here.  I’m fairly confident it’ll be entertaining and worth every penny!

I must run and start my training….I’m off to the kitchen to get a glass of wine.

Does Spelling and Grammar Matter?

I need to preface this post by stating that I’m not the grammar police and my spelling and grammar can be shocking at the best of times!

Today I was reading a blog of a Twitter friend and noticed a few typos.  Being a busy mum I was sure it was done in haste.  As I felt I knew her well enough, I thought I should quietly mention it to her and did via Twitter.  After doing so, I regretted it immediately.  However, in the end she was fine with it, explaining that Blogger no longer has a spell check feature.  To be honest, I will probably never do it again.

As usual, I threw the question out to Twitter and received a range of responses:

This has made me wonder if it really does matter.  On Twitter, it definitely doesn’t as the character limit makes grammatical errors and txt spk inevitable.  However, does it matter on a blog?  Some people don’t think so, but I think if you are trying to promote your blog beyond personal use then it should.  I fully appreciate that many of us just want to get our thoughts out ‘there’ as quickly as possible.

I find it difficult to read blogs that are full of errors.  This is due to years of touch typing classes that my mother forced me to take, which I’m now grateful for.  To calculate your speed you had to circle the errors and subtract from total words typed in a minute.  I now can’t read newspapers, books, etc without the errors leaping off the page at me.

It also reminded me of my career prep classes in High School, when they were teaching us about CV’s.  They said that employers sorted through large stacks of CV’s by throwing out the ones with spelling mistakes without even reading the credentials or experience.

I’m sure my posts are full of errors but I will try to be more diligent.

So who’s going to point out the first error in this post?

What is API and What you can do about it?

What is API?

I’m not going to tell you what API stands for because you really don’t need to know.  What you do need to know is that you only get 150 an hour and if you use them all up, you end up in #twitterjail and you won’t be able to tweet until the hour is up.

This is not a problem if you are using the web (twitter.com) as it does not have limits.  But if you’re using 3rd party clients like Tweetdeck you may find that you run out of API.   Every time Tweetdeck contacts Twitter to send or receive your tweets it uses up your API.

What can you do about it?

Firstly go into settings in Tweetdeck.  It’s the spanner in the top right corner.

1.)    In the general tab make sure you tick ‘Open Profiles in a Web Page’ (saves on API calls)

2.)    Change your Twitter API settings, by clicking and drag the slide rule.  I tend to run mine at about 50%.  I dramatically reduce how often I get DMs (10 mins) cause I don’t tend to DM very often.

3.) You may also want to check your settings on Twitter.com to see if anything is connected to your account as it will drain API as well.

I hope this helped a bit.  As you all know I tweet like a trooper and have only ever been in #twitterjail once!

If you are feeling a bit more adventurous here are more advance ideas for tweaking your settings.

How To Configure TweetDeck To Save API Drain And Engage With Your Followers – Twittercism

Good luck