litmanlive – Mike Litman

The times (and RSS feeds) they are a-changing

Short version: Update your blog RSS feed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/litmanliveblog

Longer version: So it’s been a bit of a time of change recently for me and this here blog. Along with the documented job move, I coded/experimented for the last month or so with a more lifestreamy approach to blogging on another domain. I liked it. I fell in love with it. I deliberated over how to integrate it with the current blog experience here as I wanted the best of both worlds. To run with the dashboard and the blog. I’m greedy like that.

But when it comes to this kinda thing, I’m a great believer of don’t touch what’s working. Which I learnt all too quickly again when over a previous weekend when I made the changes and then realised that after doing so, I’d made a hash of things and absolutely nothing worked. All the links were wrong and I felt like I’d made a huge mistake even touching things that work. I cursed myself for being an idiot. After having a cup of tea and getting it all back on track, I’m pretty happy with the new dashboard style homepage at mikelitman.co.uk and I hope you like it too.

So I moved the blog to a sub page of the site and created an aggregator type dashboard homepage which I absolutely love. Kinda like a visual snapshot of my life online. The articles I’m reading, sharing, writing and loving, all in one place and in near real time.

As an unfortunate consequence of moving things around a bit it would appear that I seem to have messed up the RSS thingmajig and instantly lost all my RSS subscribers because the url has changed and therefore the RSS feed has too. Or at least that’s what I’m assuming. Otherwise I’ll presume that you have a hatred for nice boxes of visuals and/or Dare. Obviously I was a bit disappointed about that as I’d amassed a quite decent number of subscribers but alas, it looks like it couldn’t be prevented.

So if you were reading the blog via RSS, can I ask that you update your RSS feed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/litmanliveblog.

You’ve got a few other choices also if you like. You can subscribe to blog updates via email also. I prefer to do this for any sites I actually want to keep updated by. Or you can now subscribe to the lifestream via RSS / email too to receive everything that I read, share, write and love.

See you soon.

Reaching 500 Twitter followers – Does it mean anything?

Update – 25.11 PM – Danny has followed up with his own response here.

I’m possibly a bit biased but when I hit 500 ‘Followers’ (people who have chosen to ‘subscribe’ to my updates on Twitter) I thought that was pretty cool. It begs the question though, what does it all mean, if anything?

It’s not really something that I presume people generally even give a moment’s thought about, but when I was gradually climbing to 500, I thought to myself, this was a milestone figure, something to be proud of, in the geekiest, self congratulatory way, there’s some people out there who value what I’m saying. It didn’t really mean anything but I wanted to say thanks to the person who clicked ‘follow’ and in turn made themselves my 500th follower.

Welcome, @dannywhatmough to the equation who works at Wildfire PR and their blog is here, and who also turns out to be a top bloke. I understand he’s been spreading the Twitter word around the company and getting a whole host of Wildfirers on board the Twitter train, welcome all. Hope you stick around.

At first I thought, I’d ask him what his favourite sweets were and send him a load of them.. Then I put a message out on Twitter, something along the lines of “How should I commemorate my 500th follower?” to which @KerryMG said “Make a cake shaped like the fail whale!”.. Brilliant I thought, that’s more like it. It got my creative juices flowing.. I can do better than a few sweets surely. I thought that the fail whale was a bit out of my creative cake making depths so for the next few days I wondered what on earth I was going to do. I’ve told him I’m going to send him something now! I’d decided it was going to be cake orientated because it has that celebratory vibe about it, a cake means a special occasion, it was perfect.

I fired off an email to Danny being as cryptic as possible yet asking a bit about him, his interests and hobbies, with a view to making a truly personalised cake..

He was a great sport throughout and I soon found out that Mr Whatmough was in to Tech (Apple) Football, Food and Tennis.. It was as if I was looking at myself in the mirror, it was bizarre!

Initially, I had visions of making a cake shaped like the Apple logo/motif type thang, in the colours of Hearts FC and with a mini man playing Tennis.. I was day dreaming about a cake, that didn’t even exist, a true sign of a genuine nutter. As time went by, I realised that it wasn’t really going to happen but soon after I ordered a cake, a cake with a champagne bottle, balloons, party poppers, brilliant I thought. Obviously I wasn’t aware of what it looked like until it arrived with Danny on Monday morning so I was quite excited myself as to how it had turned out.

So what dyu think to the finished product then guys? It wasn’t until Danny, sent me a tweet and uploaded a pic of the cake from his iPhone no less, using Twitterfon to tweet and then Twitpic to upload the pic. Danny I could tell was down with the kids, and I liked that!

PS – Here’s the original Twitpic link

It’s funnily enough proven to be a quite different kind of relationship building exercise. Who’d have thunk it? We’ll meet up for a drink in the coming weeks I’m sure and live happily ever after.

PPS – I wanted it to say @Dannywhatmough, Thanks for being my 500th follower. @LitmanLive – but character restrictions only allowed the above.. so it’s not perfect, but I think it still gets the message across 😉

Can anything be garnered from this whole thing? The world of social media does definitely bring up some utterly fantastic yet hugely bizarre scenarios that you’d never experience otherwise.

In a weird way, I think it’s great that our paths collided and I wanted to reach out and make something happen. I’m not sure I believe in fate and destiny and all that kinda stuff but then there are the odd occasions that you think, wow, right place, right time, it’s great to be alive. There wasn’t any gain from me, it was one of those genuine feelings of, I want to do something different, to reinforce the value that all these people have put in me for following me when there’s an unbelievable amount of people to follow on Twitter.

It was my way of giving something back, saying thanks.