Tag Archives: Tips

Quick Google Wave Tips

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Google Wave's logo
Image via Wikipedia

Seems anyone who visits my social media landing page, That’s Justin, asks me, how they hell do you manage it all.  Honestly, I don’t know.  It’s a bit distressing at time but I wouldn’t give it up for the world.  I’ve made so many wonderful connections, received job offers, sold prints, purchased goods, gotten better service and more all simply by using social media sites.

Here’s one of the newest.  Google Wave.  It seems the biggest question around Google Wave is, what is it, followed by, how do you use it.

Google Wave is essentially online collaboration, email, bulletin board, instant messaging and more all wrapped into one.  Right now I think we’re all still figuring out how to best use the service but I have a handful of ideas in my head!

I admit the service is pretty overwhelming but here are a few tips that make it usable for me.

The first thing you might want to do create a few saved searches, these are three I couldn’t live without.

creator:me -is:note:

This search shows all the notes/waves I created

onlyto :me is:unread:

This search shows all the notes/waves that are to me and are still unread.

with:me is:unread:

This search shows all the notes/waves that I am a direct participant in and are unread

Another quick tip, to end an input session, instead of clicking the “Done” button, try this keyboard shortcut

Shift + Enter

You can use the same shortcut to enter a reply to the last post in the wave.

Control + E will edit a post.

Save a lot of time, speed up collaboration!

That’s about it for now.  As I come across really helpful Google Wave tricks/tips, I’ll share them.  Maybe I’ll just embed a wave into my blog, that sounds like a great idea!

Right now, the de-facto Google Wave guide is, in fact, The Complete Guide to Google Wave by Gina Trapani.

What are your thoughts/tips/tricks/etc? Leave ’em in the comments!

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Optimize Your WordPress

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I have been dealing with some sluggish blogs for a while now.  Seems like it has been getting worse and worse every day.

PowWeb is my host for all of my sites and I really love their service, but recently my blogs have gotten several 500 series error messages, especially on my PiczarPhoto.com website.  I talked with their support people and, well I haven’t been too impressed.

Their servers for regular data are blazingly fast and the features are amazing, especially the database and entire site nightly backups.  Incredible.

Plus unlimited bandwidth and storage and MySQL servers.

Sadly, the MySQL server I’m on seems to be on the fritz.  I went ot Pingdom.com to figure out just how slow the site was and did some research on how I could fix some things on my end., even if PowWeb couldn’t or wouldn’t fix things on theirs.

This is what the speed of my site was like when I first tested it.

It’s Just Justin

IJJ Ping1

Piczar Photo

Piczar 1

Anyone find it interesting that both sites take 18.7 seconds to load?  Crazy huh?

Well, then I ran the most awesome WP-DBManager plugin on both sites.  This plugin will allow you to easily backup/restore/delete/repair/optimize your site’s database.

I especially like the repair and optimize options.  I had never really noticed a difference but decided that I’d run both of these and then do the same test through Pingdom.  Check out the results.

It’s Just Justin

IJJ Ping2

Piczar Photo

Piczar 2

What did that addup to?

It’s Just Justin was 40% faster

Piczar Photo was 52% faster

That’s a huge improvement.  The MySQL server is still too slow, 11 freaking seconds?  Bullshit. However, a 40-50% increase in speed is always welcomed.  Next I will try a few WordPress Cache plugins, though I think WordPress already had a caching system built in.

Hope this helps someone else out!  So go out and download Lester Chan’s awesome plugin WP-DBManager and any of his other awesome plugins.  I also use his Blog Poll plugin, awesome.

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Stop the iPhone Backup Madness

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Thanks to Gizmodo for this one, here’s how you stop the backup process on your iPhone from ever happening.  Chances are you only will need to back up once-in-a-while.  I didn’t know I needed a backup for my phone in the first place!  Here are the steps to take.

1. – Quit iTunes.
2. – Open Terminal.app
3. – Copy and paste this in, then hit return:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true
4. – Open iTunes
5. – Plug in your iPhone (2.0 or 3G) and sync.

It will take a few seconds, assuming you don’t have a ton of music or podcasts.

Changing the ‘true’ in step 3 to ‘false’ will re-enable the backup feature.

I’d probably recommend backing up once a week or each night while you sleep. With the new 2.0.1 firmware these problems are supposed to be fixed. Just switch False/True as needed and you can backup on your schedule.

It’s that easy.  Now you can sync and go!  No more watching the entire Dr. Horrible Sing-Along while you wait.

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