the personal blog of C.K.Koay
My take on some of the latest technology news and issues.
My PowerBook’s harddisk crashed today. My electronic life has come to a grinding halt. Not only have I lost the documents that I had started writing more than 15 years ago on my old 486, I’ve also lost all of my precious photos which I had taken since a decade ago when I got my first digital camera.
Sure, I have some backup here and there. But nothing as comprehensive and complete as what I have stored in my trusty, or so I thought, PowerBook. It is indeed a very dark day for me today.
Imagine a website that publishes everything that you do, every second of everyday. Imagine that your information to this website can be gathered via the phone, web, instant messaging or e-mail. This is the premise of Twitter.com, a social networking/web 2.0 (pick your own favourite jargon) web service. I’ve created an account and so far I have submitted 9 entries- 2 via SMS to a UK Orange number.
It is a pretty easy setup with very low barrier of entry for any company that intends to replicate the same model. All one needs is a web journal publishing engine that is integrated to a content database. It is also quite easy to build the engines to obtain information from web forms, IM, e-mails and SMSes.
I first read about Twitter in Wired Magazine (in fact there are 2 articles- one on the creator of Twitter, Evan Williams and one on the phenomenon) and forgot about the name all together. I recalled it was “Tweet” or something like that. Anyway, I stumbled on it again today when I was googling away at work to find ways to increase international SMS traffic.
For the uninitiated, Evan Williams is the kajillionaire who created and later sold Blogger to Google. Seeing that the barrier of entry is relatively low, what is the business model for Twitter anyway? What does it hope to achieve? Don’t get me wrong, I love the service- it’s fun and addictive at the same time. It serves critics to know that Williams was probably laughed at on the on-set when he created a website to publish peoples web logs about themselves. Now, he’s probably laughing all the way to the bank- or not. Why don’t we head down to his twitter to find out?
After a painless upgrading process that took less than 15 minutes, Rambling Thoughts is up again! Damn, WordPress is that good!
I’m upgrading my site to WordPress 2.2. Site will be down for 15 minutes.
I’ve deliberated long and hard on whether to upgrade to WordPress 2.1 or not. In the end, my sense of adventure prevailed and I took the plunge.
I’m sad to say that it wasn’t much of an adventure.
After following the easy to understand upgrading process, my engine was upgraded to 2.1 from 2.0.5 without a hitch in less than 15 minutes. Hehehe, now my blog engine is faster and contains 550 lesser bugs.
I’ve just upgraded the blogging software to WordPress 2.0.1. This was a relatively simple process (did it as I was dozing off last night). System might be unstable so please be patient if it goes down.