How do you microblog ?

Microblogging has been the latest trend among the Internet users. I learned about twitter from an article in some tech magazine. I wasn’t really planning to use it when I joined. Now it has become a habit rather than a hobby. For those who have not yet entered this world, microblogging is rather like the status message in your IM client. As twitter puts it, “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”. You can see the updates of people whom you follow and vice versa.

Then I came to know about identica from the tweets of @anivar which seemed to come “from identica”. “Identi.ca is a microblogging service brought to you by Control Yourself, Inc.. It runs the Laconica microblogging software, version 0.7.3, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.” You can integrate your twitter account with your identica account so that your tweets also come “from identica”.

Posting from the web will get tiresome after a while. So most people will go for a microblogging client. A simple google search will show you plenty of options. Every microblogger develops his own style of blogging. Here is what I do:

Now that all my twitter posts are done from identica, I have to post to only one account. Identica allows you to send and receive posts through Jabber/Gtalk. Simply give your gtalk address in the identica settings page (example@gmail.com/Home) and identica will appear as a friend in your Gtalk. To post a notice, send a message. This way you get updates from your friends as offline messages(Mind you, this can get annoying after a while.) This has got a problem. You don’t get updates of your friends who use only twitter and not identica. Being a hardcore ubuntu user, I use pidgin for my Gtalk(thereby identica), Yahoo and IRC. So using another client like twitux was not a comfortable choice. So I needed a plugin that made pidgin a twitter client. As usual, google gave me the answer. I found such a plugin – Twitgin. This plugin allowed me to listen to the updates of my friends. Now pidgin is my answer to Yahoo, Gtalk, IRC, Identica and Twitter.

But these days I use a faster way to post to identica: gnome-do. Here is a screenshot:

Follow me on twitter : @aswins

Follow me on identica : @aswins

Please share your microblogging habits as comments to this post.

Suffering from the cluttered-gnome-panel syndrome??

Are you suffering from a cluttered gnome panel because you have the habit of experimenting?? Well, I am!! Here is a screenshot of my panel:

These are what flood my panel: The standard gnome menu, My application launchers(Firefox,Pidgin,Deluge,Bluetooth file sharing,Synaptic,Terminal), Music Control Applet, Eyes, Netspeed Applet, Tomboy, Force Quit, Notification Area (Banshee,Bluetooth Applet,Receive Files Via Bluetooth,Pidgin,Tracker,Gnome-Do,Power Manager,Network Manager,SCIM), Volume Control, Brightness Applet, Clock , a separator and the Fast User Switch Applet.