Dayna.me

I have been thinking of unfollowing some people on Twitter but I haven’t got the time to filter through the list of people I’m following. I have to say I rarely ever unfollow someone on Twitter unless they are outright spammers. However, some people are really getting on my nerves these days and here’s why:

Twitter is not your MSN

Twitter is not another variation of MSN and I hope some people will stop treating it like one. I do not mind discussions, meaningful or random conversations but just not the ones like the above. I see those every single day on my timeline from the same group of people. If they wish to ask “How are you?” to the same person every day, please add him or her on MSN instead of flooding my timeline with their tweets.

I do not understand why it is necessary to reply to nearly every single tweet on their timeline with replies like Wow, I see or just a smiley face. Sorry but I’ve to say that it’s extremely annoying. If they do not have any constructive comments or additional things to add on or reply to, please do not reply then. Personally I feel that this is a lot more irritating than advertising tweets, at least most tweet ads do not fill up my entire timeline all at one time.

Try not to flood me with contest tweets at one shot

All the genuine tweets are being buried by theirs. I did not even have time to read through the latest tweets on my list before everything is pushed off by the “ABC company is giving away …” tweets. Occasional contest tweets are totally fine with me. The sad thing is, some people prefer to tweet the maximum number of entries allowed in a contest at one go just in case they forgot to do it later. If the contest has a limit of 20 entries per day, they will tweet 20 times all at once. How about an entry per hour instead? There is not much I can do besides unfollowing the person. I used to filter out the hashtag for some contest with Destroy Twitter but I would have to add a new hashtag everytime such a contest starts.

Formspring tweets can be too much sometimes

In case there are people who aren’t aware of what Formspring is, it’s a website that enables you to set up a page to allow people to ask you questions, sort of like an FAQ page.

Most people turned on the feature of sending answered questions to their Twitter account. It’s not a problem until they start answering 10 to 20 questions at a time. It’s the same logic as the contest tweets. Let’s be frank, it is logical for them to answer all the questions when they login. I would do the same too but do they have to linked their account to Twitter? Couldn’t they picked and just tweet the most important or interesting question for the day manually? Some of their followers like me won’t be interested in reading all the questions and answers but rather just the interesting ones. Some may feel that 8 tweets isn’t a large number but if 5 persons are doing it, there will be about 40 Formspring tweets on my timeline out of 100 recent tweets for example.

So, that’s my list. What about yours?

WordPress love or hate?

My blog¹ has been powered by WordPress since 2005 which makes this the 5th year I have been using WordPress. As WordPress evolved into a larger and more complex blogging platform with 1001 features² and plugins, the number of problems it’s been giving me has also increased.

I’m not known to be an adventurous person hence I stick to WordPress for fear that any changes might screw up the entire blog. Tweeps following me³ would have known that I am rather famous for screwing up my blog this year⁴. During the course of my unfortunate experiences, I had written some notes to remind myself what to do/not to do on WordPress. This will help serve as a constant reminder to myself and hopefully minimise any form of disasters on Amour Chaleur in the future.

1. Do not upload an image with the same name as any of the page/posts slugs. It might screw up the URL. I lost an entire page together with 60 over comments recently.
2. Check the support forum to see if there’s any major issues with the newest upgrade before deciding whether to upgrade or not.
3. Backup WordPress database before upgrading to a newer version.
4. Deactivate all plugins before upgrading especially if the site is running many plugins. This will reduce any issues or problems with upgrading. When I upgraded from 2.8.6 to 2.9, I got a memory limit error and it was fixed when I deactivated all my plugins.
5. When there’s anything wrong with WordPress permalinks, go to the settings page and “save changes” to refresh the permalinks. This usually works for me.
6. If you have edited any of the core/plugin files, remember to note down which file/line of code you have edited before upgrading. It’s best to backup the files before upgrading just in case you cannot remember which file had been amended.
7. If it’s possible to avoid using plugins – avoid. The website loads faster when there are lesser plugins running. This is a fantastic tutorial to output Flickr RSS feed without the use of a plugin.
8. When things go wrong with a plugin and no changes were made recently⁵, leave it alone for a while, even plugins need a break sometimes. It may just works again later.
9. If there’s a page template with the same name as a page, the page will automatically use that page template. In this case, it is not possible to switch to the default template.
10. When posting “fake” comments⁶ to test the commenting system, published a new private post for it if the comments subscription plugin is running. This prevents spamming⁷ those who have subscribe to your posts with emails.

1. Confession (2005), Liberta (2005 – early 2008) and Amour Chaleur (December 2008 – present) [«]
2. I’m exaggerating this but it does have a lot of features! [«]
3. If you have not, you really should. I’m nice (kidding)! [«]
4. I have messed up my WordPress platform at least 4 times during 2010 and it’s only February now [«]
5. There are no plugins/WordPress upgrades and the settings had not been changed. [«]
6. Sometimes I do this to make sure that the commenting system is working correctly after I made changes to the comments template or activated some new comments plugins [«]
7. I am so sorry to Cherlynn and whoever received the emails with all the “tests” contents [«]