4 Darby Media Interactive

Without Further Ado We Present The Touch Book

This is a monumental day for us at 4DM as we present our first ever gadget of the week: The Touch Book by Always Innovating.  The world of mobile technology has undergone a mini revolution in recent months, with the emergence of Google’s open source operating system Android and new, sleek netbooks like the Hewlett Packard Mini 5101.  Finally there are legitimate alternatives to the macbook, both with respect to hardware and operating system. The Touch Book can do what few in it’s class may accomplish: provide a powerful, light-weight, flexible computing system that allows users to take advantage of a touch screen interface.

Serving as a laptop computer, hand held game device, e-book reader and video player, the multi form factor Touch Book is versatile and multi dimensional.  The release date is set for next month and at a price tag of a mere $399.00 this easily has to be one of the smartest buys of the year.

Since there are no plans of adopting Windows 7 as an os for the Touch Book, users must have some expierence with Linux.  There are plenty of resources on the web that will guide you through the process of understanding the .ssh terminal and how to update distributions.

Also it’s important to note that as the Touch Book is released the software will still be in beta so don’t expect everything to go off without a hitch.  With tremendous upside, you can either wait a couple of months for more stable releases or you can dive right in head first and start figuring out bug fixes on your own.

The specifications

Always Innovating has done a tremendous job creating a netbook perfectly suited for techies and people looking for a more affordable alternative to Apple products. With further Android and Linux development underway, the open source community is continuing to give proprietary software manufacturers a serious run for their money.  The Touch Book is sure to be a ground-breaking mobile device that will help evolve open source netbook computers.

Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, TweetDeck, and Wordpress: What A Happy Family

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m still a big fan of David Cramer’s Lifestream plugin.  I have seen it at work and it is tremendous.  I still will install, configure, and edit it on any project calling for social network fusion within a Wordpress blog.  It does require some serious tinkering with if you are on a shared host and you’re running a bunch of plugins.  You absolutely have to have xCache installed for it to run smoothly and not all shared hosting plans allow php opcode caching (I still don’t get that since it does limit their bandwidth!).

Having said all that, and that was a lot, I also like a very basic, simple blend of TweetDeck and friendfeed.  TweetDeck is an outstanding real-time social network browsing application that allows you to send tweets and friendfeed streamlines all of your social networks into one place.

Here is a simple method to getting everything going so all you have to do is send a tweet using TweetDeck and have it sent simultaneously to Twitter and Facebook, and then have all status updates including everything posted in Facebook and other popular social media networks supported by friendfeed sent to your blog.

1. Go to friendfeed and sign up for free using your Facebook or Twitter accounts.

2. Once registered, click on the settings link below your username.  and add the services you want to post in your feed widget (I have Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube).

3. Edit Facebook to include your Facebook My Links URL and make sure “My Facebook Status” is unchecked under the include menu (I will explain why shortly).

4. Now click the Tools & Widgets link on the bottom of the page.  Select the widget you like and copy and paste the code into your text editor (keep in mind the width of your sidebar on your blog and alter the width of the widget or sidebar so they match up accordingly).

5.  Login to Facebook and install the official Twitter application on FB. Now all tweets will be sent as status updates on Facebook.  Sweet.

6.  Once your satisfied with your widget code, copy and paste it into a new text widget in Wordpress and save.  Now your tweets are sent in four directions: to your self-hosted Wordpress blog, Twitter, Facebook, and friendfeed.  Also, you have all your YouTube videos and Facebook links sent to your new friendfeed widget.  There are no overlapping updated statuses because you unchecked the “My Facebook Status” in friendfeed.

This is a great way to reduce loading time on your server while still letting everyone know what’s going on across your networks.

If you have any questions or would like to add to this tutorial please let us know your thoughts.  I hope this helps.

WP 2.8.1 Beta Is Already A Performance Enhancer

Like Barry Bonds using the “cream” and the “clear” to hit home runs even farther it looks like the core developers building the latest bug fixes in 2.8.1 beta ate their wheaties this weekend.  I had noticed a number of bug issues with Wordpress 2.8 when it first made it’s release, the most glaring being memory usage while parsing RSS feeds in the dashboard and in other plugins such as Dave Cramer’s Lifestream as well as a layout issue with the Gear theme (for some reason as I would edit html/php/css the editor would drop all the way down to the bottom of the page).

I have not re-tested the Lifestream plugin yet, but already the dashboard is loading much quicker and the html editor is no longer dancing down the page.

If you have expierence with Simplepie and rss feed parsing and would be interested in looking into the memory usage fatal error message in the Lifestream plugin feel free to provide your suggestions in the comment section below.