Archive for March, 2010

Who to follow and when to follow. On twitter that is.

Friday, March 26th, 2010

In line with my last blog post, I am re-evaluating my relationship with the people I follow on Twitter. I started out on the right track by following those people I was genuinely interested in and then I started following anyone who followed me because I thought it was the nice thing to do. I came under the impression that it was rude not to follow someone who so kindly followed me and then I started thinking that to get more followers you have to follow more people. This has resulted in me never reading anyones tweets no matter how interested I am in them because I have to wade through a swamp of random, useless (to me) tweets.

I am now going on a twitter followee cleanse and un-following anyone I am not actually stoked to hear from. This may result in a backlash where I lose followers myself, but I don’t really care; quality not quantity eh?.

The point of blog comments

Friday, March 26th, 2010

I am torn on how I should handle comments on this blog. Should I disable comments all together? Should I only show the positive comments? Should I reply to comments? It is also difficult to tell which comments are authentic and which comments are from people who really don’t care about what you write, they just want their comments picked up by search engines or get a comment approved so that they can then spam you.

What is the point of blog comments? Are they just badges to hang on your site that say, “Look at how important I am, people are commenting on my blog”? To be honest, I think that is how I have been treating them up until now. After giving the subject some thought, blog comments in my opinion are for turning a one way dialogue (blog post) into a 2 way conversation; be that between blog author and commenter or between commenter’s themselves. With this in mind I am now going to make an effort to reply to every comment on our blog. After deleting the obvious spam comments I simply do not want to spend the time contemplating whether a comment is authentic or not, so I am just going to accept and comment on them all!

Let’s see how this experiment goes. And please don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate the time that anyone takes to comment on something that we write.

Subversion shortcuts

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Here are some shortcuts I use on an almost daily basis that I constantly forget and then go re-read the blog post. I have taken them from an old post but added a new one:

Bulk add:

svn st | grep ^? | sed 's/? //' | xargs svn add

Bulk remove:

svn st | grep ^! | sed 's/! //' | xargs svn rm

Strip all .svn directories from project:

find . -name .svn -exec rm -rf {} \;

Edit the ignore file pattern list for the current directory with the specified command line editor (don’t forget the last dot!):

svn propedit --editor-cmd vi svn:ignore .

Check in (commit) local changes to repository with the supplied message:

svn ci -m 'the commit message you want to use'