Junk Mail

This is my front door.  For the most part it works fairly well in reducing the amount of junk mail that we receive.  However, I think we may need to get it translated into a few more languages!  :-o

Sometimes I wish I could hang one on my Twitter account.  The amount of crap I receive is unbelievable and I’m sure I’m not alone.

Please do not:

1) Ask me to vote for your nephew in a baby photo competition.  A) I don’t know you and B) the kid’s ugly.

2) Send me auto DMs saying thanks for the follow with a link.  I liken it to a quick hello over the bar, and then you throw your business card in my face and walk away.

3) If I’ve never spoken to you before, don’t ask me to support your charity.  I’m sure it’s a good cause but I don’t give money to panhandlers in the street either.

4) Send me unsolicited tweets promoting your products.  It’s up there with cold calling and the Jehovah’s banging on my door on a Saturday morning.  I will virtually slam the door in your face as well.

5) Blatantly ask me to follow you.  Why would I follow someone with no followers, no tweets and no avatar?

6) Ask me to RT something for you.  You’ve annoyed me by asking, so why would I then in turn annoy all my followers?

Have I missed any?

Thanking you in advance,

 

 

Mediocre Mum

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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