I’ve been using Posterous for a bit now and I really like it. Though I do hope they make an upgrade to the bookmarklet so that tags are easier to include when posting ‚Äî their current solution for this is rather kludgey.

Posterous is interesting as I’ve also learned how I use it, which is different than how I use my other means of sharing things I have found on the world wild web:

• My Delicious links I use primarily for myself. As I use multiple computers it’s a means to store all the links I may want to keep in a easy to search place that is independent of any machine. Basically, I add links to delicious with little care if anyone else finds them interesting.
• My Google Reader shared items is basically just for sharing nifty blog reads with others, and I only use it while reading things in Google Reader. I mean I guess I could use the Note in Reader bookmarklet to share items while websurfing, but for some reason it doesn’t seem like the right use.
• So now I’m also using posterous which you can see at links.catcubed.com. Which I’ve found is perfect for grabbing little random web snippets that I find here and there; namely, pictures and video I want to share.

Posterous is also nice as it allows you to autopost back to your blog or twitter or facebook or whereever — though as I hate the idea of posting everything everywhere, I wish the bookmarklet had more fine-grained control over this.

I’ve found through use of posterous that I don’t use it really often so I’ve decided to let it autopost to my Catcubed blog; this way they will find their way into my rss stream which I want. However, at the same time as I don’t want the front page of CatCubed to be cluttered with random shared links, so I’ve set up¬†I’ve set up wordpress using the Advanced Category Excluder plugin to exclude all uncategorized posts from the front page. This seems like the easiest solution as all I need to do is add a category as a tag and it’ll no longer be uncategorized and thus will showup on the front page.

Anyway, I bet you don’t care about any of this, but I find it useful to write about my process.

I’ve been contemplating revamping CatCubed. As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve taken notice of Rubin Starset’s lifestream page and while I still dislike the firehose that is a lifestream, I’ve been thinking that there may be a useful middle ground. While I like my current design I never really cared for the clutter of the right columns. As I read somewhere recently, right sidebars are the junk drawer of websites.

Coincidentally, Daniel Miessler just wrote about this very topic in a post entitled A Better Website Concept: A Lifestream Interface. He makes the distinction that there is a difference between created content verses found content; and he uses the incredibly useful Yahoo Pipes to dump all the found content (google reader, last.fm, stumbleupon, digg, reedit, etc.) into a rss feed he calls Discovered. Still he then goes on to dump it in the sidebar like before.

This is a nice division and I might choose to use it myself ‚Äî maybe a tabbed approach? Created, Found, and maybe All of the Above with the only sidebar widget being About and Twitter? We’ll see, though I do have more pressing projects on my plate at the moment so this might have to wait.

First post from my iPhone. Had to upgrade my wordpress install and convert my old UTW tags to wordpress tags. The UTW was causing a communication error. Well here goes — hitting post — hopefully this doesn’t throw up a new error.

I do this way too often.

I for one don’t understand all the uproar about the new Google Shared feature. I posted my shared items as a list on my public blog from day one of using Google Reader, and I have enjoyed followed the shared items of others like Scott Beale of Laughing Squid. I was really happy to see the shared feature expand as suddenly new interesting articles popped up from friend’s shared items. And when I first saw mention of the uproar on Daring Fireball, I was confused.

I mean what did these people think the word “Share” meant? Sure your shared items were very slightly obfuscated behind a unique url, but come on folks! It says right there “Your shared items are publicly accessible.” How can one ever assume from that statement that it was private? Without password protection (even then it’s suspect) your actions are there to find like anything else you do online — get used to it.

It amazes me that a lot of people still assume that they are anonymous online. Well as a certain terrible ad campaign might say, “welcome to the social.” It’s web 2.0 baby! We are now in the era of kids getting expelled for posing as gangbanger wannabes on myspace, cyber-bullying on facebook, and copywrite battles on flickr. You may be home in your underwear surfing on your laptop posting as jackalope1, but for all intents and purposes you might as well be in town square wearing a paper bag on your head while shouting at a security camera with a megaphone.

There are ways to be private online, but you gotta work for anonymity these days — always start with the assumption that nothing you do online is private.

TUAW has posted about the iPhone/Gmail/IMAP email hybrid setup tutorial I created. And now the internet horde has come making my earlier site stats look laughable.

As all you new here may notice, I commit the number one sin of blogging by not focusing on any one topic. My interests are eclectic ranging from web design, neuroscience and psychology, online health care, art, cultural commentary, politics, and the artist freak scene here in San Francisco. If I had all the time in the world, I could probably produce enough content to support a blog about each of these topics.

Instead of spreading myself thin and risking blog abandonment, I write this one single blog and write detailed and researched posts about whatever is motivating me at the moment. Some of my favorite and well received posts include:

• My Rhymes Are So Dop‚Ķ amine – a laymen’s primer on the dopamine
• Is that a cockscomb in your pocket? – discussion of John Stewart’s role as America’s court jester
• SF Politics in the 21st century – humorous discussion of the online SF Mayoral campaigns of Gavin Newsom and Chicken John
• Also related to my work at UCSF I’ve posted about Pediatric Blogging, Patient Blogging, and the lame attempts at health care information Second Life.

I hope you find the iPhone email tutorial useful. I don’t run ads here or have a donation button By request of one of my visitors, I’ve now added a PayPal Tip Jar to my blog over in the right hand sidebar under my photo. It did take me a bit of effort to figure all this out and write it up. And I’ve been busier then I expected answering everyone’s questions, so if you find this useful toss a couple bucks in so I can buy myself a drink or something!
Thanks!
Colin

p.s. You can also say thanks by sashaying over to my partner’s site, NifNaks, and checking out her adorable handmade wool dreads, wool critters, accessories — my favorite being the Flying Spaghetti Monster pin. Both her and I have poured a lot of time and love into NifNaks and would appreciate the company over there as well.