Book Review: TwittFaced

Twitter is something I know pretty well. I've been a user for 2 years. While I don't have tens of thousands of followers, I understand the power of Twitter. When I learned Josh Peters wrote a book out on Twitter, titled TwittFaced, I thought I would give it a read. I gave Josh my money and off I went.

It's not a long read, 156 pages or so, but man, this book is packed to the rafters with information. Even if you think yo know Twitter, or several other social networking platforms, Josh and his co-author Jacob Morgan do a great job of outlining the hottest tools and applications you should be looking at. And the most important part of each chapter is explaining why and how to use the services successfully.

The cover reads "your toolkit for understanding & maximizing social media". I would agree. I have marked several chapters for re-reading. Chapter nine is chalk full of statistics on social media. Chapter five talks about Facebook and the many applications which can make your experience better. And chapter 21, how to keep from being overwhelmed. I really like all of the chapters but one, the chapter on MySpace. Maybe I'm being a snob here, but I don't see MySpace as having any relevance in social media. But Josh and Jacob give it some love in chapter six.

This is a great book. Easy to read, lot's of statistics, and some great examples explaining how to get the most out of these social media platforms.

Buy the book here. It's a link to Amazon, and if you buy the book, I get a few pennies.

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NaNoWriMo Started Today And I Didn't

National Novel Writing Month is a challenge for people to write and entire Novel, at least 50,000 words, in a thirty day timeframe. For the past several years I have attempted to write consistently for thirty straight days. I'm not sure why, maybe it's because I don't write as consistently as I should. Here is an example:

Today I wrote a measly 22 words. FAIL! I wrote them just so I could say I wrote something on day one. It's a great story really, and I want to write it out. The output is 1650 something words shy of what I should be writing daily if I really wanted to make a go of it.

I will try harder over the next several days and try and catch up. Most of the time I make huge headway on the weekends.

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The Basics Of WordPress

Last night I lead a discussion on the Basics of WordPress at the Social Media Club of Salt Lake City. I really want to thank Pete Codella and Joseph Scott for asking me to participate. It was a lot of fun. Due to some technical difficulties, we had more of a discussion, which is always better than a boring lecture. Please find the slide deck here for you viewing pleasure.

Thank you to all who attended, you had some great questions, and several of you shared your experience. If you were in my class last night connect with me on Twitter or Facebook, or any number of other social network sites. Or a good old email/phone call works too.

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Oh Yeah I Have Snow Leopard

Posted via web from The Thom Allen LifeStream

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Easy Way Detect Changes On The Clipboard With Windows API

A recent Windows Forms project required that I copy data from a grid and an associated object with each cell copied. This allows a user to paste the data in the same grid but in a different set of cells.

My problem came when a user would copy data from an external application like Excel, and tries to copy the text into my grid. I had to come up with a way to determine the user was trying to paste something copied from an external program.

There is a great solution using a Windows API called GetClipboardSequenceNumber().

[DllImport("user32.dll")]
static extern uint GetClipboardSequenceNumber();

Using this API allows you top capture the sequence number every time something is copied to the clipboard. Here is the workflow I went through.

1. Capture the sequence number when the mouse or keyboard events are fired

2. When the paste event is fired, check the clipboard sequence and compare it to one saved locally. If the numbers are difference, only paste the text, if they are the same, paste the text and the object.

I put the sequence capture in my Copy method so it’s changed internally every time someone chooses Edit/Copy from the menu, presses CTL-C, or right clicks and selects Copy from a popup menu.

This seems to work pretty well. There really isn’t any code to share other than the knowing which DLL and method to use. Where to store the sequence and how you use it is going to be up to you.

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