After initially setting up some stuff with twitterfeed, I decided to try ping.fm instead. At the same time, I upgraded this Postie thing thing that I use to sometimes post via email. Between those two things my last post went kind of nuts and didn’t do what I wanted. So more testing here. Apologies in advance. Regular programing will resume shortly.
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Starting right before the new year, I got all wound up playing Scrabble on the iPhone with various Facebook friends. I was having lots of fun. I was spinning up to always be playing 10 games at a time. (All asynchronously, often with moves a day or two apart.) I of course had a whole little system worked out so that whenever I dropped below ten games, I’d start a new game inviting friends to a new game based on a randomized system where people who I knew were Scrabble players had greater odds of being invited than people who were not, and people who I’d never invited had better odds than people who I had invited before, but hadn’t played. I kept graphs. It was fun. Somewhere along the line though, Facebook made it so that Scrabble couldn’t send notifications any more. This made it so it was harder for people to know when their turns were. (At least people actually playing on Facebook, the iPhone still has push notifications for this.) It made it harder for me to scan and see who was playing and who was forfeiting (so as to change the weights on the probabilities I was using to determine who to invite.) It just generally made it harder to do what I was doing. I could still do it, but it was a bigger pain than before. So I decided a week or two ago to just wind down my playing. I’ll still accept requests for games from anybody who wants to play, but I won’t be sending out any new requests. So my number of games is slowly winding down. From the ten I was keeping it at I’m now down to five. Unless I get unexpected invites, those will slowly wind down and I’ll have none left. Oh well, it was fun for awhile!  7 Mar 2010 23:25 UTC For quite awhile now, maybe a year, maybe less, dunno, but for awhile, I have had the Facebook “Notes” app set to import the RSS feed from my blog. So basically each of my posts would show up as a Note in facebook. This seemed to work pretty well. My posts would usually show up on Facebook an hour or two after I posted them on my blog. And I started to get more comments to my posts via Facebook than directly on my blog. Which is cool I guess. But lately, the last month or so, the delay between me posting and things showing up on Facebook was getting longer and longer. A few hours turned into half a day. That turned into about a day. Then it was several days. Then a little over a week ago I noticed that none of my posts had moved over in almost a week. So I went in to the Notes application and reentered the address of my RSS feed. It responded by quickly importing several of my recent posts it hadn’t gotten yet. But then I made more posts. It has once again been a few days (not quite a week yet) and nothing has come through. So I think I am done with that method. I’ve been using TwitterFeed for quite a few months to dump my blogging into Twitter. Turns out it can do the same for Facebook. (I could also add a level of indirection and go from Twitter to Facebook, but…) Anyway, I set it up a little bit ago, and see it already posted my most recent blog post. Unlike the notes, it is just a headline and a link to the post on my blog, rather than a full copy of the whole blog post. Guess that means less people will actually read any of them, but I guess that’ll be OK. If you are one of the folks who looks at my posts only through Facebook, you’ll just have to click through. Or just go to Abulsme.com directly of course. For now, I haven’t actually turned off the notes feed. In theory it is still supposed to work. I’m curious if it will ever start posting stuff again. Maybe it will, just with a two week delay or some such. We’ll see. If it does start doing something again, I’ll probably turn off one or another method of doing this to avoid duplicates depending on how things are going at the time. Of course, I know there is also the idea that just having the same things posted to my blog, Facebook and Twitter defeats the purpose of them as separate platforms, and maybe I should just use each of them in distinct ways. Maybe. But as far as I’m concerned, my blog, where I have full control of what is in it, I have the backups, I could switch hosting whenever I want, etc, etc, etc is my single place for anything I want to put online. Everywhere else can have pointers back, but I’m not going to put stuff I really care about in someone else’s system as the primary place it lives. Pointers linking back are just fine. It is bad enough that I am using Flickr and YouTube for some pictures and videos. But the original copies of all that content remains safely in my care. I just use them for convenience. :-) Anyway, we’ll see how TwitterFeed works for this purpose. Theoretically, with this posts on my blog should always show up on Facebook (and of course Twitter) within 30 minutes. That will be better than what the Notes import was doing even when it was working, let alone when it started lagging by days… if it is even working any more. If anybody has any thoughts on this way of doing things, or on alternative ways to accomplish this kind of thing, I’d love to hear them. Thanks!  7 Mar 2010 23:19 UTC  25 Apr 2010 01:41 UTC
 2010 Mar 7 23:03 UTC
What did annoy me though was afterwards going and reading a bunch of Wikipedia articles about the various historical characters in the movie and seeing just how far off from historical truth the movie is. You see, I know when you make a historical movie (or novel, or whatever) you need to flesh it out and fill in all sorts of gaps not actually captured by the historical record. You need to make it interesting and entertaining. You have to match some sort of narrative structure. You may include tons of stuff for which there is no historical proof. But these should be things that COULD have been true. Things that add and fill in gaps. But not things that directly contradict known historical fact. See, if you are going to do that, just change all the names, use made up countries and places, and call it straight out fiction. Not historical fiction, just fiction. Nothing wrong with that. Tell a good story. It can be great. But then don’t pretend the story is actually about William Wallace who lived from 1272 to 1305 and then give him a love interest with Isabella of France who lived from 1292 to 1358 and who didn’t come to England until after Wallace was dead. And don’t make King Edward I die during the course of events here who actually lived after that. Don’t completely change around the timeline of when Robert I of Scotland did various things. Etc, etc, etc. It seems various people have called this thing one of the most inaccurate historical dramas ever made. The kind of things they have done here would be comparable to making a movie about the American Revolution where Washington died heroically in battle, Franklin became president, and Lincoln showed up to save the day. It might be great fun, but it wouldn’t even remotely be related tot he real history. OK, now I kind of want to see that movie with the Washington/Franklin/Lincoln SuperFriends. I guess having said all of the above, it was a fun movie… as long as you don’t get hung up in any of the bit about it being “based on a true story” or learning about anything interesting from a historical basis. It is just fiction. They should have used made up names and places. But it was a good fun movie. Lots of violence of course here. It is about a war of course. It is known for the battle scenes.
 2010 Mar 7 23:02 UTC |
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