This is just a test post to see if the Posterous tags will get passed to WP. Oh, and a pic of some shrimp. The sales guy apparently thought they’d be tasty.

Posted via email Tina’s posterous

I don’t know if I’d mentioned this before, but I was having difficulty getting the blog-by-email setup between my hosted WP and Google Apps email. (yes, now I’ve given the hackers of the world all they need to take over and make me look like a fool; little do they know I can do that just fine by myself). At any rate, I figured I’d give Posterous a try: I can post to it by email, and it will in turn post to Real Life, Virtual World. Call me lazy if you like, but I appreciate the ability to post by email. It perhaps means I’ll be more likely to write stuff (crazy thought, ain’t it?).

What I’m interested to see is whether or not the blog grabs the tag that I’m sending to Posterous in this mail. Hmmm…

There are a couple of other reasons I’m interested in trying Posterous, though they’re still auto-blogging related. I have it on good authority that the bookmarklet is rather lovely, and after having been spoiled by the FriendFeed bookmarklet this is now high on my priority list. I’ve tried it out and so far it looks like it will do well, especially since it gives me the option to share the item everywhere (which now just means Posterous and this site), or post only to Posterous. This is important because I want to avoid an echo problem if at all possible and some of the items I’ll be bookmarking into Posterous will come from FriendFeed (and if those items were to auto-post to Real Life, Virtual World they’d just turn around and go right back into FriendFeed and that would mean the world would end or something). My only gripe with the bookmarklet so far is that I see no way to tag items. I tried using the same nomenclature as tagging via email, to no avail.

At any rate, I’m hoping having one more avenue by which to post material means I’ll be more likely to keep up with what has the opportunity to be a rather enjoyable and gratifying site. More to the specifically, though, is the fact that I’ve been asked to include some frugal eating tips here on Real Life, Virtual World. I’m all kinds of happy to do so, but right now my blogging time is rather limited. I’m hoping the Posterous integration will help me out, allowing me to quickly share tips when I find them.

Posted via email

As you might know, I am moving into a new office this week. We don’t require much out of an office other than a rather nice address for the business cards and internet; it serves as a home base, a place to land between site visits and trips to the data center. So with that, we’ve opted to work from our mobiles rather than install a phone system.

Now, that might not seem like too big a deal to you. Working strictly from a mobile phone is in no way uncommon. But those people aren’t working from my mobile. The number was originally a land line, I had it installed right before I went to Argentina in 2005. I worked for the phone company at the time so I oversaw the installation order and hand picked the phone number. It’s a great number and I intend to keep it. In the past few years I’ve ported it from land line to voip and finally to mobile.

With this in mind, I set out on a quest for a virtual phone number. I don’t need toll free service, I have no use for fax. My criteria were really pretty simple:

• The proper area code for my location.
• Voicemail capability.
• Calls had to forward to the number of my choice; not a static number and not my computer.
• I needed the ability to make outbound calls.
• No per minute charges.

Simple, right? Apparently not so much.

Not a lot of services offer the upstate South Carolina area code. Plus, the per minute charge was a deal breaker for several services, as was the outbound calling. After a bit of searching and getting some recommendations on FriendFeed, I happened across a service called Vumber. And before you ask: yes, that’s an affiliate link.

Vumber met all of my requirements above (you notice I didn’t specify a non-dorky service name) and has several other things going for it as well, not the least of which was the free 30 day trial. A good free trial is a beautiful thing, and being the value minded person I am I’m always willing to take advantage of one.

After the trial it’s $9.95 a month for up to 20 hours of usage. I’ve not had 20 phone hours for work any time in the past year, so this wasn’t an issue in my book. For those that are curious, checking your voicemail by phone does count against your time for the month. The flip side of that is the fact that you can listen to your voicemail online, so there’s no need to check it over the phone.

That $9.95 gets you a virtual number and voicemail box (see, Vumber makes sense now!) that will ring to whatever phone number you specify. You can add additional Vumbers to your account for $3.95 a month, or change your existing Vumber for $1.95 ( actually, the first three times you change the number are free).

The feature set of Vumbers are relatively simple, but interesting. The most intricate is how to direct incoming calls. You can set any of the six handling methods below via the online account interface or by dialing into your Vumber.

• Route calls to the number you’ve specified (in my case, my mobile)
• Send them straight to Vumber voicemail
• Busy signal
• Continuous ring
• Temporarily out of service message
• Disconnect message

You can see now why many of the reviews I found online were with regards to the dating scene… As an aside, if you have the calls ringing through to your phone and you miss the call, they are routed back to your Vumber voicemail box, not your standard voicemail.

Other options include what to pass to your caller ID (either the person who called you or the Vumber itself), what you hear when you answer (’press 1 to accept’, announce the originating number, or put the call straight through), and whether or not you want to enable emailed missed call notices. You can also set a PIN and alias for each Vumber.

The best feature for me, though, is the ability to place outbound calls. You add ‘registered private numbers’ to your account, and these numbers are able to place outbound calls through your Vumber. That virtual number is what winds up on the recipients caller ID. Perfect!

Blocking and speed contacts are the two remaining features. Blocking handles calls with anonymous/unknown caller ID information or other phone numbers you specify. You can route these calls to any of the call handling options above except to your number. Speed contacts let’s you specify frequently called or special numbers so that you can dial them more quickly as an outbound Vumber call. You also have the option to handle calls from your speed contacts as you would blocked numbers. Sounds like just the thing when you want to send a certain client straight to voicemail but be able to dial them back quickly. Not that I’d do that, of course. But someone might find it useful.

My method of using the service is going to be very straight-forward. I have my account set to show my Vumber when it calls, and that number is in my phone contacts as my work line. So my phone rings, the screen shows work line, and I can answer the phone properly. If I miss the call it goes to my Vumber voicemail which has a brief, work branded message. I can listen to that message from my phone, in my Vumber account, or via the email attachment they’ll send me.

And there you have it, an overview of the rather simple but perfectly adequate feature set of Vumber. I’ve received a test inbound call and placed a test outbound call. The call quality was fine, though there was just a hint of a delay. Thing is, the test call I made and received was from an overseas number, so the delay might have been due to that and not the service.

So far I am more than pleased with what I’ll be getting for my $9.95 a month. Once I get a chance to use the service a bit more, I’ll give an update.

Oh, and about that affiliate link: if you use it to sign up you get the 30 day free trial and I get a free month of service. Just wanted to be up front about it =)

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m big on site stats. Other than comments, obviously, stats are the one way I know I’m not just talking to myself. Not that there’s anything wrong with talking to yourself… Anyway, after a quick perusal of my stats to date, I have to say I’m not quite sure what I’m seeing. My top post, hands down, is 25 Things About Me. Second is the post about using Intense Debate for comments, and third is my rant about social media drama. So from what I see, my readers like getting the inside scoop on me, social media, and quite possibly have a love of list posts.

Is this right?

I’m asking because I want to know what you like to read. That doesn’t mean I’m always going to write it, of course: some days all I’ll have to post about is the fact that the cat threw up on me. But the whole purpose of writing (other than getting some clutter out of my brain) is to have someone read it. And I like you, so I kinda want you to stick around.

So there you have it: an open request for topic suggestions. Leave your thoughts in the comments, otherwise we all run the risk of seeing that cat vomit post some day in the future.

The one thing that keeps me writing is the fact that I know people expect it. It’s what happens when you start a site, it’s what you hope for in fact: people like what you write enough to come back for more. I don’t have ads, I don’t get a lot of links, I don’t even have a purpose. All I have is my urge to write and you, the person reading this.

When you combine this with my unholy love of numbers and charts, the result is me checking my site stats unnecessarily often. I like seeing that someone else has been here, it gives me fuel to write something even when I feel I have nothing to say. This was more true than ever when I looked at my stats this morning and noticed that I’m getting hits for people searching for “25 things about me”.

You’re probably painfully aware that I participated in the 25 things meme earlier this week. Yes, it’s my most popular post right now, but for a two week old site that’s to be expected and it didn’t strike me as particularly odd. But the fact that people are searching for “25 things about me” is interesting. This meme has struck a chord with the people who participated as both writer and reader to such an extent that they’re actively looking for more lists to read. That’s impressive, if you ask me.

So, out of curiosity I did the same search. You know you’ve done the same, trying to put yourself in your reader’s shoes, trying to see what they saw. I searched Google for 25 things about me with no quotation marks just to see what I’d get.

The result was approximately 33 million documents, and my post is the number eleven result. Well now, that’s interesting…

See, as someone who’s not really relying on search for incoming traffic, I don’t pay a lot of attention to SEO. Yes I changed the way my URLs look, but that’s more for my ease of use than anything. Other than that, I don’t have a targeted set of keywords, I don’t run my posts through an analyzer, I don’t tweak the meta data of my pages. I just write, often times sloppily, and cross my fingers that at least one person will read it and get something out of it. So how does someone who doesn’t care and doesn’t try wind up with such a good spot?

Perhaps it’s the fact that this site is new. Or that (so far) it’s being updated relatively often. Maybe it’s some sort of snowball effect from the amount of traffic I got from FriendFeed for that post. Whatever it is, it makes me feel like an  SEO savant: good at something without knowing how I’m doing it, how to do it again, or even how to make it useful.

This combined with the fact that many people spend significant time and money to optimize their sites leaves me feeling frustrated. If SEO were truly useful and meaningful, then a site like mine with low traffic and little to no relavence really ought not float so highly in the results. Where are the long-standing blogs that participated, the ones with established readers and higher page ranks? Where are the posts that talk about memes in general while referencing this particular example? Where are the posts talking about how this meme signifies people’s interest and desire to connect with one another even if it’s only a virtual kinship? What about the meta posts, such Mona’s on Pixelbits, which gathered data from the lists of countless participants?

It’s like the old adage about not wanting to join any club that would have me as a member: any search that shows my site so highly in the results makes me question its validity. One hopes that performing a search will return results from high authority sites that are trusted, established, and consistent but who haven’t sresorted to gaming the SEO system. This little exercise only serves to make me sadly aware that this isn’t the case.

On the other hand, perhaps I should just add ‘SEO savant’ to my resume and hope it trumps ‘expert’.

Photo credit: Rsms

In case it wasn’t obvious, this blog is a new project for me. There are many like it, but this one is mine (sorry, couldn’t resist the reference).

At any rate, given that I’m starting a fresh new project I’ve decided to make it an ‘all new’ experience. For instance, this is my first WordPress blog; in truth it’s been a year or two since I’d even played around with the platform. Also new is the choice of comment providers: Intense Debate.

So, why Intense Debate you ask? First and foremost is that it’s new to me and thus fits in well with the ‘all new’ experience on this blog. I’m using Disqus on a separate project and am quite pleased with it, but there’s no way to make a comparison between two services if you haven’t in fact used both services.

At this point I have the service up and running, and integration into the WordPress platform was about as quick and seamless as one could hope for. Granted, this is a new blog so there weren’t many comments to port over to the Intense Debate database, so I can see where an established blog would have a much longer transition time.

The setup is too new for me to have many thoughts on it, so I will likely have to revisit the issue to let anyone who cares know what I think about it. So far I can say that I like the straightforward option to export comments, and that I dislike where the widgets are placed in their system. Currently widgets have their own area within the user dashboard rather than being a sub-set of the options for a particular blog. Since they give the option to have multiple blogs underneath a single user account, it would make more sense to have the widgets show up as options under each particular blog. Then again, as I don’t have multiple blogs setup in their system, perhaps the menu items change when there are multiple blogs under a user account and I can’t see that.

Feel free to let me know what you think of the new commenting experience!

It’s inevitable: when you have more than two people involved in anything there will be disagreements and clashes of personalities. I accept this and understand it, it’s one of the constants of human interaction. Whether we like it or not, it happens. What sets you apart is how you react to it.

Take a trip down memory lane with me, will you? Think back to high school, or perhaps junior high. If you’re like me you weren’t exactly the most popular kid in school. More importantly, you knew it. You knew you didn’t dress right or have the right hair. Maybe you had glasses, or braces, or something else that made you different. Every morning you woke up and got ready for school, you knew you weren’t going to be sitting with the cool kids at lunch.

Did that stop people from reminding you of it? No. They’d pass notes, or post signs, or giggle when you walked past. Perhaps worst of all were the not-so-secret conversations where someone would comment to their friends about how they hated how weird you were as you walked down the hall. Just loudly enough that you’d be able to hear. Yeah, you already knew you were weird. Having some popular kid announce it in the hallway only made things worse.

Do you remember that? I know I do…

I bring this up, a memory (or set of memories, rather) painful enough to bring tears to my eyes almost 20 years later, in order to make a point. The people behind the word you read online are real. Someone is sitting on the other end of the tubes typing in those posts and comments. You have every right in the world to disagree with what they think. Heck, you can even think they’re stupid (I know I do sometimes).

But to respond by loudly letting the world know that you’re blocking or leaving or whatever else is juvenile. It belittles the person on the receiving end, making them feel just like you did when those popular kids told everyone how much they couldn’t stand you. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the right and the person did in fact do something stupid, just as it didn’t matter that you were in fact weird (and maybe smelled a little funny) in high school. The fact that it something is true doesn’t make it hurt any less. Sometimes, those things hurt more than lies.

So the next time you’re involved in social media drama and are tempted to call someone out, take a step back. Do you want someone to announce to everyone on a service that they’ve blocked you? Or that they think your content is annoying, spammy, or perhaps just a little too low-brow for the service you’re on? If not, then do the adult thing and take the other person’s feelings into consideration. Block if you have to, but don’t announce it to the world. You’ll likely be involved in a lot less drama in the long run as a result.

Yes, you might be a geek if you opt to test you ability to post to your blog from your phone. Fine, if you’re going to be technical, that geek is me…

Since I have yet to get post by email to work with Google Apps hosted mail, I decided to go this route for now. So far the WordPress admin area works quite well on the G1.

The photo upload is disabled on the phone, but I can add hosted images to posts. Not ideal, but it would definitely work in a pinch.

And there you go. Exhibit one to prove that I am indeed a geek.

Google’s besmirched favicon choice totally looks like… A scrunched up Cadbury Egg wrapper.