For someone who's trained in IT, I can be amazingly Luddite in attitude at times.
Ok, who am I kidding? I absolutely despise change to anything and everything that might upset, nay, even vibrate my cushy little comfort zone. I had to be dragged kicking and screaming out of Windows 98, and by the time I took the plunge, I'd already modded my software in a desperate attempt at improving the poor memory performance. I had replaced the Windows shell with Litestep (OMG! that was just SO AWESOME and sexy that I was almost able to forgive its shortcomings). In fact, my time with Litestep shell awakened me to how people could switch to Lunix AND LIKE IT. *
It took the dogged determination of my then-boyfriend to pull me out of the dark ages and into the light of Windows XP. That's right, folks, this little gamer had been playing Quake 3 on an OS that had been long left behind by her battlemates. Other LANners at Macquarie Uni had eagerly queued up for the debut sales of Windows Millennium Edition (HA! Hahaha, haha. And ha. HAHAHA! ok, I'm over it now.) In even larger numbers they grabbed hold of Windows 2000's Professional release. So there was I, languishing on an OS deemed by the gaming community to be three-times-superceded.
And even when I relented, it wasn't so much that the boyfriend convinced me. He also lived with Mr Cool Geek, who helped run the LANs, and one of the coolest dudes I've ever met. Goo rocked up to my place, shiny XP CD in hand, and it was a done deal. There's no way I could win the argument against the two of them ganged up, so I let them have their way with my little puter.
I fell in lust with XP so fast that it's odd I'd resisted so long. But here I am, doing it again, sworn not to touch that rabid Vista. Anyway, this post wasn't about Microsoft. Microsoft, a company that once made Millennium Edition. HAHAHA!
This post was about me and social networking. I hated hated hated the idea of Facebook and was NEVER joining it. I now have tons of friends on Facebook. Worse still was that freaky Twitter thing. I have no clue how you work that damned thing, it's new and faddy, it won't take off, I'm not bothering with a weird texty thing like teenagers use in class! So, did I mention that I love Twitter more than I love Facebook?
And stubbornly yet again I had absolutely no interest whatsoever in these API thingies and clients and whateveryoucallits for Twitter. I don't need to tweet from my car, from McDonalds or while on my mobile phone. There's nothing wrong with the Twitter home page, why get any other app?
Today I went searching for a tiny Twitter app to run on my desktop. I'd reasoned that if something were running down there, I'd be more likely to update it more than once a day. (The impetus for this was the fact that I am earning money from advertising on Twitter, and the less I talk the less I earn.)
First I tried a browser plugin for Firefox. I HATED IT. It was just ugly, weird and made me feel like a DOS n00b seeing a mouse for the first time. Binned. Then I found something called Klipfolio. A forum post said it had a Twitter option. WOOT! Install, ok, now I need to add the Twitter "Klip". WTF?
I need to interrupt myself here. I've never been so pleased with a new app as I am with Klipfolio. It's a collection of shortcuts ("Klips"). You can view it as a window, a toolbar, a taskbar, a sidebar, whatever you want. In that way it reminds me a bit of Litestep but brought into the 21st Century. You install your base, um, thingy, and then you choose your addons and snap them into the bar/window/toolbar. You can have it always on top, you can hide it, you can have it sit above your taskbar, etc. You can make it huge or tiny and you can just drag and drop to rearrange your Klips.
Right now I have a little CPU monitor (96%, but that's a game's fault), a currency converter telling me that the Aussie dollar is worth 54 euros, a search box for Youtube, and a widget that brings me the latest flash games. But I digress. I wanted this thingy just for the Twitter widget so I could post from the desktop.
AND THERE IS NO SUCH THING! Oh the tears. Klipfolio has a metric bajillion** Klips doing everything and more, including a Facebook "status" updater showing you what your friends are all doing, but no Twitter widget? The only one they have sends you nothing but dev updates and news from the Twitter owners.
Frown.
Tantrum. It must be here somewhere.
In the end I've compromised. I Klipped in an RSS feed for my Twitter page instead. Incidentally, this wasn't so easy. Twitter futzed with their feeds not so long ago and made them rather unfriendly to third-party applications in general. Even Google Reader can't cope with them (they require certificate authentication). So I found a free clean burner site and wedged its offering into the RSS. I now have a cool little tooltip that pops up from the clock showing new Twitter tweets in my feed. And of course I can turn it on or off, make it show more or less often. I can't directly update Twitter yet but Klipfolio say it's in the works. And if one of the tweets looks interesting I just click it, the tweet appears in Firefox, and I can hit reply.
I feel fresh and new. Invigorated and very proud of my achievement.
I think this must have been how Hillary felt on reaching the peak of Mt Everest.
Or how Bill Gates felt when Microsoft released Windows ME.***
Hahahaha!
* Lunix is not a typeoh.
** Bajillion is a technically scientific number.
*** ROTFLcopter.
