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With all the changes and problems over on the Twitter. One impact has been that the Twitter WordPress Widget has stopped working.
Instead of the stream of tweets, you get the impression from the error message that I don’t use twitter.
Though I don’t use the widget on this site, I do use it on other sites.
Thinking now, do I remove the widget, leave it, or what.
I guess what is key, am I still using the Twitter?
I have been using IFTTT (If This Then That) for quite a few years now. Though over the last few years my usage has got quite minimal. During some research activities using tweetchats and hashtags I did use it quite a bit for work.
Now in the main I use a recipe to post native photographs from Instagram to the Twitter.
Lovely sunny day https://t.co/mDp0WQxDDf pic.twitter.com/KKNuOfJ4wD
— James Clay (@jamesclay) May 16, 2023
So it was with minimal disappointment to read in my inbox this from IFTTT.
Starting on May 23, all free users will be limited to 2 Applets and unable to access Twitter Applets. We hope you understand this change is designed to help us support our community and continue to focus on improving IFTTT. To ensure that your existing Applets continue without interruption, consider upgrading to Pro or manage your Applets via My Applets.
Now the subscription is not excessive, at £2.50 per month, cheaper if you pay annually. However I really don’t think I will get £30 of value from IFTTT over a year. I can configure Instagram to post to Twitter automatically, or I could even just post manually.
I still also get two free applets if I need to use IFTTT.
It appeared that my IFTTT applet I use to publish my Instagram photos to Twitter was broken.
I use the Applet, Tweet your Instagrams as native photos on Twitter which takes an instagram posting, posts the image to Twitter. You can share your Instagram postings automatically to Twitter from Instagram, but back in the day this would only post a link. So rather than post each image manually to Twitter I used IFTTT to do this automatically. It had been working fine for years, but recently stopped working. I did get a notification, so I went into IFTTT disconnected and reconnected the applet. I then posted an image to Instagram to check it was working.
Got me thinking I might want to see how IFTTT an worth with Mastodon. Though I do intend to wait and see how Mastodon fares, and if auto-posting is a thing there.
I moved to Mastodon this week.
Elon Musk started to impact on the Twitter, so much so that lots of people were talking about moving off the Twitter and onto other similar services, with Mastodon getting much of this traffic. We had some discussions about Mastodon at work. I went out and created an account on mastodon.cloud and then discovered I had already created an account before, well back in August 2018, on mastodon.social. So, I went back and deleted the new account and started to use the original account.
Though I had been on Mastodon since 2018 the recent influx has got me back on the app. Though my stream of stuff seems to be mainly people telling people how to use Mastodon and what and what not to do on the service and how it is different to the bird place (they mean the Twitter).
Reminds me of Twitter in 2009 when there was a similar level of new users starting to use that service. Back in 2008 I wrote this blog post about how I used the Twitter. I basically said Twitter was all about the coffee.
You can say pretty much the same about Mastodon.
However for me Mastodon is all about the coffee.
It’s the coffee you drink with colleagues during a break from work, where you discuss work stuff, but also discuss your commute into work, what you saw on TV last night, what bizarre thing you just saw, the weather.
It’s the coffee you drink whilst browsing the web and when you find an interesting web site and you post the link to your blog, in an e-mail, on your VLE.
It’s the coffee you drink in a coffee shop, where you’re reading the paper, reading a book, chatting.
Mastodon is the coffee you drink in the Library reading a journal, a book, writing stuff.
It’s the coffee you drink with fellow delegates during a break or at lunch at a conference. Where you discuss the keynotes, the presentations, the workshops, where you are going next, your hotel, the food, the coffee, what you do, where you’re going, what gadgets you have in your gadget bag.
Mastodon is about these moments, but without the physical and geographical limitations. Mastodon also allows people from different institutions, different sectors, different organisations, different departments to share these moments. I brings in people from different industries, different countries, different perspectives.
When you decide to follow someone, ask yourself could you drink coffee with this person, would they drink coffee with you?
At the end of the day Mastodon is all about the coffee as Twitter was in the day.
Back in August 2019 I wrote a blog post about how to use Chrome or Firefox extensions to use the “old” Twitter web interface instead of the new Twitter interface.
So you don’t like the new Twitter?
Well you can revert back to the old one in a couple of ways.
If you are running Chrome or Firefox then there is an extension you can install which forces your browser to use the old Twitter interface.
Alas, as of the 1st June, changes at Twitter has meant these extensions no longer work and you are now forced to use the new Twitter! When you attempt to use them you get this error message.
I am now looking for a Twitter client for my Mac which looks like the old Twitter…
So you want to use your iPad a whiteboard in a Teams meeting? Well this is one way in which you can do this easily. You will need an iPad (obviously), a whiteboard or drawing app and it helps to have another device (main computer) to interact with the meeting as well as using the iPad to draw from.
This post came about after seeing this tweet on the Twitter from Charles Knight.
Is there an easy way to use an ipad as a whiteboard in say teams? Because it would be handy to have a separate device like that…
— Charles Knight (@Charlesknight) May 1, 2020
It got me thinking about whether this was possible, but also how you would do it. So I quickly tried it out and it worked fine. I did tweet a response, but have now written it up as a blog post so others can refer to it (and I can remind myself how to do it as well).
Though you can screenshare direct from the iPad, once you are screen sharing on the iPad, you can’t see the chat or other members on the Teams call.
One solution is to join the meeting from both your main computer and your iPad at the same time.
As well as screen sharing you can also share other content or video from your iPad as well.
So on the main computer start or join a Teams meeting.
Continue reading “Using iPad as separate whiteboard in Teams”
A couple of days ago, the IFTTT recipe I used to post native Instagram photos to Twitter stopped working. I used IFTTT as the sharing function on Instagram to Twitter only posted the link, whereas with IFTTT the process posted the full image.
Getting some air #366photos2020 #366photos https://t.co/Pb8UPelDas pic.twitter.com/7RRfY1c95Q
— James Clay (@jamesclay) March 23, 2020
However in the last few days, it has stopped working, and I wasn’t entirely sure why. I checked my IFTTT applet process and saw this.
I recall getting an e-mail from IFTTT, which now I can’t find, but I didn’t think applied to the applet I was using. Well it still may not apply, but I did the following and this appears to have fixed the problem.
What I did was re-authorise IFTTT to access my Instagram account.
Go to this page (ensure you are logged into IFTTT).
Click Settings
Click Edit
You will then have an opportunity to reauthorise IFTTT and Instagram.
And then reauthorise IFTTT to access your Instagram account.
I then posted an image to Instagram and low and behold it turned up on the Twitter.
GF Rocky Road https://t.co/rewmWvEcMQ pic.twitter.com/sxAgSpmWuq
— James Clay (@jamesclay) March 29, 2020
It’s interesting now though whereas before the applet created an ift.tt address the process now uses the instagr.am address.
I recently changed hosting for my WordPress blogs. My main reasons for changing were, my host was unable to update the version of PHP which would result in being unable to update to the most recent version of WordPress. They did offer me a new hosting contract, but I would then have to migrate my blogs across, so I decided that if I needed to do that I might as well review new hosts. I had had reliability issues with my existing host. I was also concerned about upgrading to SSL (https). Both Chrome and Safari were marking non-https sites as “non-secure”.
It’s not as though I was doing e-commerce on my blogs, but it looked like Google would drop non-https sites down in their search results. I also thought the “non-secure” identification might worry people.
There were a few challenges, mainly as I took the opportunity to move a couple of my blogs to a domain of their own. I say opportunity I wasn’t sure I could recreate the same setup with the new host that I had with the old one.
Decided to record and log what I had done, just in case I needed to do this again. Continue reading “Changing hosts…”
Alas, as of the 1st June, changes at Twitter has meant these extensions no longer work and you are now forced to use the new Twitter! Links have been removed to the extensions.
So you don’t like the new Twitter?
Well you can revert back to the old one in a couple of ways.
If you are running Chrome or Firefox then there is an extension you can install which forces your browser to use the old Twitter interface.
GoodTwitter for Chrome
GoodTwitter for Firefox
Install the extensions and your browser forces Twitter to use the old interface!
There is another way without installing an extension which is as follows.
Click More
Click Settings and Privacy
Click About Twitter
Click Directory
Click Home (sometimes you click Notifications first)
You should then have old Twitter back.
So there is a lack of persistence, but there is also a quicker method is to use the URL
https://twitter.com/i/directory/profiles
which I’ve added to my bookmarks for quick access.
I can’t get this method to work on Safari and persist though.
So what is that Twitter all about then? My thoughts from 2009 a real blast from the past.
My main argument was that it was all about the coffee.
To be honest, it still is….