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Using HootSuite to Suit Your Social Networking Mesh

If you have more than one social network you want to update, you need a way to effectively interact with your Social Mesh — you need one centerstone from which all thoughts can spike and spire.

I am currently using HootSuite — a social media dashboard that you can configure to help manage updates to your online work life.  A major benefit of HootSuite is that I can think once and publish 20 times.

Propagation is now — the future is no longer singular — we are perpetually pluperfect.

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How Not to Leave Blog Feedback at 7:00am on a Sunday Morning

There’s nothing quite like waking up early on a Sunday morning to a voicemail ping that a new message is waiting to be heard.  Imagine my non-delight as, at 7:00am, I listened to some woman start a five-minute rant against and article I wrote eight years ago — and she started it all off with this sentence:

“You’re a piece of sh@t.”

I’m not spelling out the her word of the day, but you get the idea of where the rest of her message was heading.

Based on the Googly mess that is a Google Voice email transcription of that voicemail, and the manner in which it started, I deleted the voicemail after that first sentence without listening to an insane person trying to wield imaginary power against ruining my day.

I found it highly amusing that the Google Voice email transcription ended the call with the woman admonishing me to be kinder and gentler and to become a “compassionate person!”  Harr!  There’s nothing quite like the cold fish of irony slapping a hapless caller right in the face as payback for drunk dialing!

Continue reading → How Not to Leave Blog Feedback at 7:00am on a Sunday Morning

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YUkon 2-8888 and FAculty 1-3700: The Sweet Antiquity of New York City Alphanumeric Telephone Exchanges

I love it when the old-time New York City Magic rears its beautiful noggin to remind us all just how elegant and grand the ancient city was when stewed in its own antiquity.

Part of that temporal, New York City, Golden Age, nostalgia that still lives today can be found right in the palms of our hands and in the tips of our fingers!  The old alphanumeric telephone exchanges for certain 212 area code numbers still live, and still exist in everyday service, even if we no longer consciously need to use them to make a phone call.

The most famous iteration of the alphanumeric NYC calling can be found in the title of John O’Hara’s fine book, BUtterfield 8 — that also became a famous Elizabeth Taylor movie.

Continue reading → YUkon 2-8888 and FAculty 1-3700: The Sweet Antiquity of New York City Alphanumeric Telephone Exchanges

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Why We Converted a Facebook Personal Account to a Business Page

On Saturday, I made the decision to convert my personal Facebook account into a Business page.  It was not a difficult choice to make because, even though I had over 5,000 friends and 200 followers — when your friends queue is full, Facebook forces them into “following” you — I was really only posting Boles Blogs updates to my timeline.

Even though I don’t make any money from Boles Blogs, creating a Facebook business page offers some unification of thought and clarity of purpose on the social network.  I would “lose” my friends and their updates, as well as my own timeline since 2006, but I would also gain thousands of “Likes” — “friends” get converted into “Likes” when you convert a page — and my “followers” would also, magically, become “Likes” on the new page, too.  I would only have to update one Facebook page instead of two.

Here’s what the new Boles Business page looks like now on Facebook:

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Today is Our Eight Year Anniversary on WordPress.com

This morning, at 2:55am Eastern, as I was waiting for the Apple Store to open at 3:01am — a lovely notification popped up in my WordPress.com admin area telling me today, September 20, 2013 — was my eighth year anniversary on WordPress.com!

Now that is a milestone to celebrate!

I remember I was one of the super-early adopters here on WordPress.com and I was the in the early 500s as a registered user number — there are now over 80 million WordPress blogs in the world.  I loved the idea of Matt Mullenweg‘s WordPress.com right from the start:  An excellent publishing platform that was dead-simple to use all day every single day of your life!

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Great Blog Posts Demand Excellent Article Rewriting

Our beloved Boles Blogs author Nicola just finished writing an incredible, and memorable, stretch of connected articles that absolutely deserve our devotion and celebration!

Over the past 20 days, our Nicola wrote 18 articles for publication.  These were not simplistic blog posts.  These were intricate posts packed with photographs and personal insight.  Many Boles Blogs articles average 300-500 words, but Nicola’s works in this stretch averaged over 800 words per post and many doubled that number.  That’s over 15,000 words written in 20 days!

Continue reading → Great Blog Posts Demand Excellent Article Rewriting

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Reviewing the Tom Bihn Cadet Bag for MacBook Air

When I recently tripped in Times Square and nearly fell flat on my face, the one thing that saved me from a smashed pelvis was the Tom Bihn Cadet bag I use every day to protect my 11-Inch MacBook Air.  My iPhone and computer and teaching materials were in my Tom Bihn bag and, even though I fell, full-force on that bag, nothing was damaged except my ego and a few scrapes and bruises won on the way down.

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Consuming the Adobe Creative Cloud

I  have been using Adobe products for over 20 years.  For many years, I was on the yearly upgrade cycle and, even as a previous purchaser, the upgrade fees for the Adobe creative suites easily cost over $600-800 USD per year.  That was quite a hit for a young author and designer fresh out of graduate school, but if you wanted to play with the big boys, you needed big boy toys, and Adobe is, and has always been, the web and authoring standard.

Over the last few years, with the churn in the business from a purchase model to a renting model at Adobe, I’ve patiently waited on the sidelines with my hardbox copy of the Adobe CS4 still in everyday use — about three generations behind the leading curve — and CS4 has served me well.  The new Adobe “upgrades” have seemed incremental and confused, and I was happy to keep skating along with Photoshop and Dreamweaver CS4 until two things happened.

First, I purchased a new MacBook Air that had plenty of room to install a ton of new software and, second, Adobe announced the end of boxed editions and were going rogue and “online subscription only” from here on out using a monthly and yearly for-pay model.  Two days ago, I signed up for the new “Adobe Creative Cloud” and I am totally thrilled with the decision.

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The Boles Blogs Apple MacBook Air 13-inch Mid 2013 Review

Yesterday, I took delivery of a brand-new Apple MacBook Air 13-inch computer.  I decided to leap on this upgrade for several reasons.  First, I love my Apple MacBook Air 11-inch model and it has been my main machine for 18 months, but it was starting to show its technical age.  The SSD drive was only 256GB and memory, at 4GB, was in short supply when it came to the work day.  Google Play Music live streaming would stutter and go bump in the night.   I am now back to true multi-tasking with this spec’d out machine.  My 11-inch MacBook Air was suffering from a lack of space and mind.  You can see part of my Apple family below.  The 13-in MacBook Air is in the center, my old, non-retina, iPad is my clock on the left, the 11-inch MacBook Air is nearby for comparison, and my beloved Thunderbolt display is on the right.

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