Categories
Umum

Linimasa Instagram Lebih Ringkas (dan Lebih Bermanfaat)

Foto oleh Kate Torline di Unsplash

Setelah saya bebersih akun Instagram, dengan mengurangi jumlah following, linimasa Instagram dan Instagram Stories menjadi lebih ringkas. Sebenarnya bukan cuma mengurangi, tapi memang jadi ada akun yang malah saya ikuti. Tapi, secara umum saya kurangi. Dan, akun yang saya berhenti ikuti cukup banyak. Berikut yang sudah hampir tidak ada di lnimasa Instagram saya:

  1. Akun selebritas. Hampir tidak lagi akun selebritas yang saya ikuti. Ya, dulu mungkin menarik untuk diikuti, tapi setelah dipikir-pikir, buat apa ya saya ikuti? Walaupun mungkin masih ada, tapi bagi saya mereka itu lebih kepada figur publik, dan saya memang suka dengan kontennya — yang kebanyakan bukan terkait posisi dia sebagai seberitas.
  2. Akun terkait hobi, jualan, dan lebih spesifik akun jualan tanaman. Ketika hype hobi bertanam muncul dan makin teman saya yang hobi bercocok tanam — baik hidroponik maupun tanaman hias — saya banyak mengikuti akun dengan tema tersebut. Jadi, mungkin linimasa saya sekarang tidak sehijau beberapa bulan kemarin.
  3. Akun layanan daring seperti Gojek Indonesia dan Grab, termasuk akun layanan digital seperti dompet digital, layanan perbankan, dan akun yang terkait dengan niaga-el (e-commerce), juga sudah tidak ada dalam linimasa saya. Walaupun, aplikasinya beberapa masih terinstal di ponsel Android saya.
  4. Akun yang tidak saya kenal. Dulu saya mengikuti balik akun Instagram yang mengikuti akun saya. Tapi, setelah saya secara acak ikuti, ternyata saya heran karena ya… sebenarnya tidak kenal. Bahkan, ada yang saya tidak memiliki “mutual connection”.
  5. Akun terkait dunia penerbangan, akun wisata/perjalanan, atau hiburan. Termasuk akun travel/food blogger. Saya sisakan mungkin tidak sampai 10 dalam kategori ini.
  6. Akun yang tidak aktif. Saya lihat daftar akun yang saya ikuti dan menghapus cukup banyak akun yang selama ini hampir tidak pernah saya lihat di linimasa atau Instagram Stories. Tapi, ya bisa saja karena saya tidak masuk dalam “Closed Friend” akun tersebut. Yang soal ini ya tidak apa-apa juga. Kadang sebelumnya saya lihat dulu akunnya sekadar melihat kapan konten terakhir diunggah.

Sepertinya ya sesuai hasil yang ingin dituju: lebih ringkas — dan lebih “ada manfaatnya”. Karena, sebenarnya ada cukup banyak akun yang malah saya ikuti. Dan, kebanyakan adalah terkait dengan pandemi COVID-19, seperti akun dokter, atau akun yang berisi infomrasi singkat dan tentunya bermanfaat.

Categories
General

WordAds

WordAds is 100% optional and is designed for bloggers who would like to earn money from their blogs by showing high quality ads from brand advertisers. FM is well known for representing top blogs with high quality ads for sites like AppleInsider, Bakerella, and BoingBoing.

Make money by joining WordAds

Categories
General

Klout Adds Five New Networks

If you like to analyze influence using a service called Klout — or, you like to analyze your own Klout score — this might be a good news. Klout just added five new services to build (hopefully) better scoring. You can now add services like Tumblr, Instagram, Blogger.com, Flickr and Last.fm.
The additional services try to cover popular services for blogging, photo sharing and also audio. Those services make internet users become more connected each other.

I’m curious whether other popular services like WordPress, Smugmug and Google Plus will be added there or not. Google Plus does not have its API right now. Okey, we’ll see. How’s your Klout score?

Categories
General

Are you using WordPress' Post Formats feature?

If you have upgraded your WordPress installation to the latest version (right now, it’s Version 3.1), you can take advantage of its “Post Formats” feature. So, what is it anyway? WordPress Codex explains:

A Post Format is a piece of meta information that can be used by a theme to customize its presentation of a post. The Post Formats feature provides a standardized list of formats that are available to all themes that support the feature. Themes are not required to support every format on the list. New formats cannot be introduced by themes nor even plugins. The standardization of this list provides both compatibility between numerous themes and an avenue for external blogging tools to access to this feature in a consistent fashion. In short, with a theme that supports Post Formats, a blogger can change how each post looks by choosing a Post Format from a radio-button list.

This feature might be useful if you want to “format” your blog posts, especially when you want to have different output format from your WordPress theme. Just think about Tumblr service. Tumblr is very easy to use when you want to make a kind of item collections. Sometime you want to embed a video, post a link, make a regular blog post, or even embed an audio file. If you want to create a new post, you will have something like this:

Categories
General

Firefox 4: Graphic Drivers Problems

Yesterday, Firefox 4 was launched and lots of people — including me — are happy now. I heard about Firefox 4 features during last year Pesta Blogger in Jakarta. At that time, Mozilla Indonesia brought some people from the team (including the developer) to share some knowledge what could be expected from Mozilla Firefox 4. I was impressed with some features, even some features were already shipped with browser like Google Chrome. It was like, “Okey, that’s cool. But, {name one of the browsers here} already has that (feature)”.
After that, I have Firefox 4 Beta releases installed on my MacBook Pro. I had two version of Firefox browsers installed so I could jump between them when I want to see some changes. Everything was running great, including the upgrade processes. I haven’t found any problems so far. When I joined the Firefox 4 Twitter Party, I was happy.

Yahya Kurniawan's Twitter avatar

But, is everyone happy? No. Yahya Kurniawan, a friend from Jogjakarta, didn’t have his Firefox 4 run well. The issue was on the graphic drivers. Everything was fine — he had some browsers installed, anyway — until he had Firefox 4 installed. He’s still upset, I think. :)
Yes, Firefox confirmed that there are some bugs:

Firefox 4 automatically disables the hardware acceleration and WebGL features if the graphics driver on your system has bugs that cause Firefox to crash. You still get all the other benefits of Firefox 4, of course, just not the newest graphics features. But for best results, you need an up-to-date graphics driver that fixes those bugs.

You can also find some additional details at Benoit Jacob’s blog. So, if you happen finding the problem after installing Firefox 4, you might want to check this issue.

Categories
General

Jogja Wall Nation: Mural Competition

There will be an event in Jogjakarta called “Jogja Wall Nation” this weekend (October 14-15). It’s a mural competition. The competition will take place in Malioboro area. What makes it different is that the event will start in the evening until early in the morning. I got news that right now (when I write this post), there are already 150+ registered participants.
Jogja Wall Nation
Now, if you’re journalists, bloggers or social media users who want to come to this event, you’re all welcome. Malioboro street will be closed from around 10 PM (October 14th). If you want to know more about this event you send your questions/inquiries from its website or don’t hesitate to contact me directly. More info about this event can be found at Jogja Wall Nation official website.

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General

VisualMelancholy

VisualMelancholy — a photoblog of Firman Firdaus; an editor, designer, and blogger at Daustralala. I love big pictures! :)

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General

Online Journalism Handbook

The Bighow Online Journalism Handbook

A free online resource for journalists, bloggers, citizen journalists and anyone else interested in publishing. The handbook covers the basics of online reporting, writing for the web and social web, citizen journalism, professional blogging, how to use Facebook and Twitter, how to deal with censorship, list of citizen journalism websites worldwide, list of free tools for journalism and much more

Categories
General

Youngest Blogger

Here’s a list of youngest bloggers. If you know young bloggers — here, they’re below 18 years old, just add them to the list. The rank is based on this formula: Age: 20%, Google PR: 25%, Technorati: 30%, Alexa: 25%. It’s debatable, but I’m interested on the list rather than the formula. Just look at their age and blogs.

Categories
General

New design for this blog

I have been very busy in the last few weeks, many things to do. I needed to recharge my energy. And this is the result: a new design for my blog. I created this theme for fun, at least to keep my mood in balance, to bring my mood back to the other design work.
After upgrading to WordPress 2.7 few days ago, I wanted to have some changes here, especially by taking advantages from new features introduced in the latest WordPress, e.g. built-in threaded comment. Here are some notes on my new blog design.

Template tags

Still related to template tags, I try to take advantage from the way WordPress produces CSS selectors. Here is an example. Open index.php in default theme folder, you should see this for the entry loop:

<div <?php post_class() ?> id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">

The code above will produce something like this:
<div class="post hentry category-services category-sites category-www category-webdev tag-htaccess tag-facebook tag-linkedin tag-service tag-twitter tag-url" id="post-1026">
Do you see the pattern? It will produce some post classes on the entry data (categories and tags). This function is called post_class(). By this, we can customize how each entry (inside the loop) should be displayed, just work with the stylesheet.
If you want to make you theme compatible well with WordPress 2.7, just head to Migrating Plugins and Themes to 2.7 article at WordPress Codex. There are some other useful information for theme designers — and also for you as bloggers.

Categories
General

Short URLs to Social Services Using Own Domain and .htaccess Redirection

These days, there are many social services we use. I use some of them. Bloggers or websites also provide some links on their blogs/websites to those social service. If links to our profile is easy to remember, that should be great. For example, it’s easy to remember my Flickr photostream using http://flickr.com/orangescale, or Twitter account (http://twitter.com/thomasarie).
But, what about Facebook, Technorati, or LinkedIn? My Facebook profile page is located here: http://www.facebook.com/people/Thomas-Arie-Setiawan/695771665. There is a Facebook application to create more memorable Facebook profile, page or group. They will be something like profile.to/thomasarie or groups.to/AnyGroupName.
Few days ago, @mahadewa and @huda mentioned about this. Anyway, there is .htaccess for redirection. So, why not using it to produce more memorable URLs for our profile? It’s easy. Now, I can have https://thomasarie.com/facebook (Facebook profile), https://thomasarie.com/linkedin (LinkedIn profile), and more.
Since [added later: I have my own domain name,] my web hosting uses Apache and supports .htaccess, it’s very easy to do it. I just put these lines in my .htaccess (in the root folder).

Redirect 301 /facebook http://www.facebook.com/people/Thomas-Arie-Setiawan/695771665
Redirect 301 /flickr http://flickr.com/orangescale
Redirect 301 /linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasarie
Redirect 301 /openid http://openid.orangescale.com/thomasarie
Redirect 301 /technorati http://technorati.com/people/technorati/thomasarie

“Redirect 301” means permanent redirection. You can add as many redirection rules there. Just see the patterns there, pretty easy to understand, right? And, I think it’s easier to remember. It also nice if we use it for our business card :)

Categories
General

Podcast, videoblog and Pesta Blogger

Okey, let’s make it short. I have started a podcast channel and videoblog few days ago. If you visit my blog, you might have seen in on the sidebar. The reason was pretty simple: I like doing it, and I enjoy it. :)
Just go to my podcast channel and videoblog. About Pesta Blogger 2008 — I will join it! — you can listen to foreign bloggers’ comment during their trip to Indonesia few days ago. Some videos are also available.
I will be going to Jakarta this evening using Mandala Airlines with Lala, depart from Adisutjipto International Airport at 5:15 PM. If you subscribe to my blog, you probably did not get updates from my feed. I’m enjoying Twitter very much now.
Have a nice weekend all, and… Jakarta, I’m coming!

Categories
General

Pesta Blogger 2008

Last year, I joined Pesta Blogger (Indonesian Bloggers Gathering — official site). It was a great event (Flickr photoset). More than 500 bloggers gathered at Blitz Megaplex. This year (2008), Pesta Blogger will be hold in Jakarta again. At first, it was scheduled on October 25th. The commitee announced that it will be hold in November. Still haven’t got valid info about “when” and “where”. Ayway, this-year theme is: blogging for society.

Categories
General

The BOBs – Best of the Blogs: Deutsche Welle International Weblog Awards 2008

the-bobs
Just a reminder. This year, The BOBs (Best of the Blogs) 2008 has been started on August 31. Compared to the last year competition, this year Indonesian bloggers will have an opportunity to join the event. So, if your blog is written in Bahasa Indonesia, you may join. The award will be given out in 11 different languages: Arabic, Chinese, German, English, Dutch, French, Indonesian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
What is Deutsche Welle?

Deutsche Welle is Germany’s international broadcaster: online, on-screen and over the air. It provides a European perspective to audiences around the world and promotes intercultural dialogue.

Last year, the event got more than 7,000 submissions. The number will increase not only because Bahasa Indonesia is included as one of the criteria, but because the number of bloggers is also increasing this year.
Okey, let’s talk about the mechanism. If you want to join, submit your blog from the submission page. Your blog will not be nominated immidiately. The editos will check every submission to make sure that it fits the criteria. You can nominate yourself, or other bloggers.
Read more details about this award on the FAQ page. Anyway, one of the judges — from Indonesia — is Budi Putra (the CEO of Asia Blogging Network).

Categories
General

Google Chrome Download and Install: First Impression

When I heard about Google Chrome, I was very curious and really wanted to try it. Now, it’s available for download. I could not stop comparing Google Chrome with other browsers installed. Of course, I found that Mozilla Firefox and Opera are way much better than the first release of Google Chrome, at least right now.

Download an Install

Google Chrome Homepage (by Orangescale)
Unlike other browsers, we could not download the executable installation file. At first, we need to download an installer (around 475 KB), and run it. It will download the Google Chrome after we executed it. Wait for some moments, and you will be prompted to the next installation steps. The installation process was really straight forward. Everyone should be able to do it without problems. Anyway, Google Chrome is only available for Windows XP/Vista right now.