On one hand, blogging is often thought to be about long articles with plenty of text formatting, links, and images. Sometimes it sounds too complicated or time consuming (and sometimes it is). On the other hand, there are plenty of blogs which feature small “useless” posts about the blogger’s whereabouts and his or her current activities. “My cat is eating her food now” kind of thing. These blogs are usually interesting only to people who are personally familiar with the blogger.

Well, there is another option now. Twitter was specifically designed for microblogging. Any post of yours can be only 140 characters long and can’t have any text formatting like bold or italic text, or paragraphs. You can’t insert any images, sounds, or videos. But you can still have links. And you can write as many posts as you want.

The best part of Twitter is that it makes blogging really simple. You can post via Twitter web site, you can write your tiny blog posts from your instant messenger (like Google Talk), or you can even send them from your phone via SMS.

As with many other social services, you can connect with and follow other users of Twitter. And the second best of the Twitter services is that you can read your Twitter friends’ posts on the web site, or get them in your instant messenger, or, even via SMS.

Now this might not seem like a lot, but it is. Just pause for a second and think of all opportunities…

There are numerous ways people use Twitter now. Here are just a couple of scenarios for you to consider.

Shopping advice. You are out doing your shopping. You are given a choice of product A and product B (and maybe even product C). But which one is better? You can’t tell from the packaging. You need to check them all out on the web. You can either do that with your mobile phone, which has a small screen, an even smaller keyboard, and a slow GPRS connection. Or you can send an SMS to Twitter asking the question, and your friends, who are behind computers, will do a quick research and let you know what they think you should get.

Group activities. You and a few of your friends decide to meet for some fun in the downtown. Or you are going to check a new spot for barbecue. As most civilized people of 21st century, everyone drives his own car. There five or six cars around and you got a bit lost or confused. Or have an idea for a better spot. Instead of calling or sending SMS messages to each one of you, you can all use Twitter instead. Send a message and all of your friends will get it.

These are just two of common uses of Twitter. There are more. People let everyone know what they are doing, where they are heading, and where they are having lunch or coffee. Some use Twitter for software or hardware monitoring. Comedians use Twitter to post one-liners. Even politicians use Twitter to get instant opinions and let their voters know what are they (politicians, not voters) up to.

Yet another good thing about Twitter is that it has a very simple interface. There are no nested drop-down menus with millions of buttons. There are no pages upon pages of settings and options. There are no lengthy manuals. It’s dead simple. Register to get your username and password. Login. That’s it. You can already use it. There is a text box which you can use to type and send your text. Done. When you got used to it a bit, add your instant messenger and phone to start using advanced features like SMS. It’ll take you less than two minutes to figure it out.

Are you a bit worried about your privacy? Or who will be reading your updates? Or your SMS phone bill? Don’t be. You can make your microblogging private or public. You can choose who can read your posts. You can choose when you want and don’t want to get SMSes. You can choose for which people you want to be notified via SMS and which ones you want to read on the web. You can control all these either from the Twitter web site or from your instant messenger or from your phone via SMS.

For the technical people among you - Twitter has the bells and whistles that you probably expecting from a Web 2.0 web service - from RSS feeds for anything to an API through widgets and badges for your web site.

Try it out. You won’t be disappointed.

Many of you, Cyprus bloggers, use Flickr for image sharing. Flickr is not only an excellent technical solution, but also a great community. Tomorrow, Sunday, April 22, 2007 there will be a meet-up of Cyprus Flickr users. The meeting will take place in Larnaca. On the seaside palm promenade there is an Irish bar. People will start arriving at around 18:00.

Since this is the first meeting, there won’t be a lot of agenda or anything. It will probably go any direction that the participants will take it. Given the sociality of Flickr users, photography backgrounds of some of them, and Irish alcohol spot, a few interesting outcomes are possible…

Are you coming?

I came across a nice guide on how to move WordPress blog from one hosting to another. This might be quite useful for people who use self-hosted WordPress blogs. However, this tutorial is incomplete, if you need to move your blog from one location to another. Say, for example, you had a blog at http://old-domain.com/wordpress and now you want to move your blog to http://new-domain.com/blog .

Can it be done? How hard is it?

Well, it can be done. It’s not as easy as many other applications, mostly due to WordPress using absolute URLs instead of relative. There is some database trickery involved.

First of all, follow the instructions in the article that I linked to above. Prepare you domain for DNS changes by setting the shorter TTL period. Then prepare you new hosting space and database.

You can disable comments for the time being. I usually don’t do it, since my blogs aren’t that popular. And usually I move blogs from development server to a production one, so comments is not something I am very concerned with.

Dump your database and load it at a new location. Copy all files as they are. Don’t forget the wp-content/uploads directory, as well as .htaccess and wp-config.php . The last two will have to be changed according to your new settings. .htaccess file usually has the mod_rewrite rules for friendly URLs. It can be either edited manually, or re-generated from the WordPress (administration -> Options -> Permalinks -> Update permalinks). wp-content.php contains settings for your database connection (host, username, password, database name).

You are almost done. Now you have to change a few things in the database.

First, you need to update WordPress options with the new blog location. Here is the SQL that you’ll want to modify:

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value,’http://old-domain.com/wordpress’, ‘http://new-domain.com/blog’) WHERE option_name = ‘home’ OR option_name = ’siteurl’;

Secondly, you’ll want to fix URLs to your posts and pages. As I said above, WordPress uses absolute URLs instead of relatives. So you will have to run the following SQL query:

UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid,’http://old-domain.com/wordpress’,'http://new-domain.com/blog’);

Thirdly, you’ll want to fix links in your posts and pages. If you used absolute links to other posts of you blog, they’ll break with the move. So we better fix them like so:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content,’http://old-domain.com/wordpress’,'http://new-domain.com/blog’);

Now you should login to your administration (you’ll be logout because authentication cookie is for another domain) and check that everything works. If it doesn’t, check the logs of your web server and ask for help in #wordpress IRC channel on opennet.org.

Linkify bookmarklet is truly a wonderful thing. An instant happiness even.

If you are a blogger, or often comment on blogs, or just write text with links to other web pages, you should get yourself a Linkify bookmarklet. It makes inserting links a three-click process. You just select the text that you want to make into a link, click on the bookmarklet, which opens Google search results for the selected text in a frame on the right-side of your browser window, and then you just selct the appropriate result by clicking on “Create link”. That’s it.

Found via Matt Cutts, via Twitter. You see, how easy it is…

We have received a notice from our upstream hosting company about an increased number of WordPress break-in attempts. It is strongly advised that you urgently upgrade your WordPress installation to the latest version, which is 2.1.2 at the moment of this writing.