twitter - Lester Hein

How the internet lets me stay awake 24 hours a day. Sort of.

Right now, I am asleep. And it’s not even today. Right now, it’s actually last week, which is when I wrote this post.

You see, this is a scheduled post, which means I wrote it, set a posting date and then went along my business (probably writing another post). But what about the Facebook post and the Tweet I sent out about this post? Also scheduled, so that they would go out after the article was published. I was, in fact having a sandwhich at the time.

How does it work?

I run my blog on WordPress, which I consider one of the best bloggin platforms around. Whenever I write my blog posts (usually on Sundays) I schedule them to be posted at different times and dates using the built in scheduling option. There’s not much to it, and anyone can learn how to schedule wordpress posts in just three steps

How To Schedule WordPress Posts

Write your post
Click on the Publish date and set it to whatever you want
Click ‘Publish’ et voila.

You will receive a confirmation message above the post editor that let’s you know when your post will be published.

“Post scheduled for: Jun 22, 2012 @ 6:00”

That really is all there is to it

Tip #1 – WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin.

Sometimes looking at all your upcoming posts in list view can be a little disorientating – you don’t get a clear sense of what is posted when. To solve this problem, I use a plugin called WordPress Editorial Calendar to show me exactly when my posts will be sent out.

Have a look – each of these is scheduled to be posted at around 2-3pm South African time, which is when I get the best response to content I post.

You can download the plugin here

Tip #2 – Posting to Facebook and Twitter in the Future

To help me schedule my Status updates and Tweets I use Buffer. It works by allowing you to set a time window for your content to be published. Most of the traffic to this blog comes from South Africa, which is why my posts are set to go out between 10am and 4pm SA time. That’s 2am to 8am my time. And I’m still fast asleep.

Status updates and Tweets are intentionally scheduled to go out later than blog posts and not at the same time. I learned the hard way that it’s better to give it a little while (caching, daylight savings time, whatever).

You can create a free Buffer account here

Using these two simple tools, I’m able to post content, comments,status updates and tweets pretty much around the clock. Which in my opinion is pretty cool.

Go ahead, try it for yourself – it’s easier than you think and people will think that you are somehow magically awake all the time.

coffee-lego — Img Src: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootcoot/4802606550/in/faves-joeshlabotnik/

What's that score thing in Muti?

So, after joining Muti (a digg type service for South Africa) on Wednesday, one of the first things that I noticed was that each of my submissions had a score attached to it. Immediately my sense of curiousity was sparked, and so was my competitive nature – what was this score jobbie, and how could i get mine to be higher than everyone else’s?

After scrounging around the muti site and reading all the support docs I could find, I finally realized that the answer was not on the muti site. At first this hacked me off a teensy bit (the inner OCD me coming out) but now I see why it’s not up there. Following the futile site digging i sent out a tweet with a #muti hashtag hoping that a) this hashtag existed and b)someone would be able to help.

As luck would have it, thakadu had just started following hashtags and we started conversing on tweet. Here’s the low down on muti scores:

(Oh, before i start – these scores will be removed from the muti site soon, and that’s why there’s no lit on them available anywhere.Take it away Thakadu)

Muti Scores

That score is a composite of “clicks” and votes. It is a holdover from the very early days of muti when I needed a way to differentiate posts before there were many voters. Its basically a weighted value for votes (right now I think its 15 points per vote) and “clicks” (I think its 9 points per click)

I say “clicks” in quotes because its not as simple as just plain clicks for the following reasons:

Only the first 5 clicks at the same ip address are counted, this is so that you cant just repeatedly click on an item to raise its score.
Many people (more than 60%) don’t use the muti site to read muti (They use rss, twitter, jaiku, jabber etc etc) ie its only clicks from the site (In the early days muti did not yet have all these alternate means of reading so it was more reflective)
Some browsers quite simply don’t report the click accurately, most notably some versions of IE. (The click is an ajax call and some browsers simply ignore ajax when clicking away)

So as you can see its a very rough score it worked well in the early days but its pretty much obsolete now and one of these days I will probably remove it, most people look at the votes and not the score.

</end muti goodness>

Thanks for taking the time to give me the lowdown thakadu! After less than one week as a part of the muti community, I think I can already say that I really like it here. Now if I could only get a t-shit out of them (nudge’s rafiq)

Lather, rinse, retweet – how i wound up @ technomadic

All week long i’ve been hearing stories on just how cool Twitter is and about how people have been connecting both locally and internationally, so I thought that I’d tell my own little twitter story.

How i wound up @ technomadic.

It’s all @magictim’s fault, really it is. I got on to twitter about two weeks ago. Sure i’d heard and read about it, but i though ‘what the hell good is a 140 character blog? I talk far too much for that to be of any use to me.’ And oh how I wrong I was.

I met Tim very briefly at Quirk eMarketing‘s staff bash a while back (the promise of free beer and pizza on a Friday night was more than enough to lure me there…) After baffling him about how i knew his name (i saw his pic on facebook) and chatting over a beer, I next met him online in the twittersphere (is that a word yet?). After watching Tim tweet to some of his contacts, I started following @simonebiz. That still sounds weird when I say it out loud. Anyway, I started following simone and one of her tweets read something along the lines of ‘Simone is looking forward to Nomadic Marketing.’ So me being me i busted in and asked about what exactly Nomadic Marketing was all about, since the name sounded really cool. She explained it all to me and then informed that sadly, registrations for the course had closed 2 weeks earlier

Simone then recommended that I follow @daveduarte, who was hosting the course. So i did just that. Dave put me in contact with someone at the GSB and before you could say comfy geek slippers I was registered as a delegate at Nomadic Marketing. I’m sure that if they’d told me they’d be calling me a ‘delegate’ I would have signed up just so I could pretend to be Kofi Anan.

Anyway, I thought that it was really cool that I was able to get a tangible real world benefit from thus ‘new’ social network which is slowly taking a beakhold in South Africa. a clear indication on that power that these networks offer. UCT likes it too, since they now have my money.

As soon as I figure out how to add twitter feeds to wordpress.com‘s widgets, I’ll do just that.

Till then, a little birdie told me that you can follow me @here

@lesterhein