Automate Your Social Content Publishing

There are many people in the world who use powerful social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, etc to communicate with  their friends, find interesting contents, to be the first to get notified of the breaking news and more. Many of us who are active in any field are using these tools to produce and publish contents as well looking at the fun side of these tools.

Personally I’m accustomed to share interesting links, apps, quotes or any other thing I find during my daily web surfing and let my friends and followers enjoy them too. You may have many feeds which you take a look every morning and select some of them to read and maybe share; but it’s not a good idea to share them all at once and flood your friends timeline with consecutive tweets or status updates! This will also decrease the chance for them to be read.

Said all these to introduce some services which can help you schedule such updates in an easy and productive way; let’s start with the problem:

I want to tweet every single item which I star in my Google Reader but not at once, schedule them to publish during the upcoming hours.

My solution is to use various services to accomplish this:

• I will use IFTTT to automate publishing contents which I star in Google Reader.
• I will use Buffer to schedule tweet publishing throughout the day.
• I will use Tweriod to find out which hours are the best to schedule my tweets to send out.

Now let me explain more; First of all go to bufferapp.com and signup; it lets you send and update from their website or schedule it based on the hours you specify in the Settings page. You can also authorize this app with your bit.ly account so that it posts links with your own custom URL shortenner (like mine: go.mahdi.ws); then go to ifttt.com and signup; IFTTT lets you connect various service together and run them as automated scheduled tasks. In our case you need to select Buffer and Google Reader from Channels and add them to your channels; after that you can create your own recipe to post starred item in Google Reader to Buffer or use my ready recipe for this.

Congratulations! You’re done! Starting from now, all your starred items in Google reader will be automatically posted to your Buffer queue and will be published during the day.

There is one more cool optional step to use if you like ;-) Tweriod gives you a report on what are the best hours to send out your tweets based on various parameters; sign up and wait for your first report to arrive in your mailbox; then you can adjust the best posting hours for your tweets just by connecting your Buffer account to Tweroid and let it do its job!

New Domain And My Tumblr Blog!

Due to some personal reasons I changed my main domain name to mahdi.ws and will use this as my main address; mahdi.mp is still mine and valid and is redirected here. I changed FeedBurner address and if you’ve subscribed to my feed you don’t need to change anything.

In addition, I started my Tumblr blog at daily.mahdi.ws in order to share some small pieces of my feelings, things I read, listen to or watch daily. Follow me there :-)

Slides of My Talk at Open Web Platform Seminar: “Microsoft, Web Standards and Open Source Software”

Today I had a session at the first Open Web Platform Seminar in Tehran (follow on Twitter #owp1391) and talked about ”Microsoft, Web Standards and Open Source Software“.

As the title of my talk implies, I tried to cover two topics during my talk:

• Microsoft’s efforts to support web standards in its products from server side technologies and tools (ASP.NET and Visual Studio) to turning IE into a modern and standard web browser.
• Microsoft and recent activities to support OSS and help the users enjoy the best of both worlds: Microsoft products and tools plus open source products which are great when used side by side with Microsoft tools.

Despite this fact that slides of my talk is not that much useful without my explanations, you can download them from here or view on SlideShare.

Email Notifications for New Pushes on GitHub

It’s pretty easy to use post-receive URL hooks on your Git server to receive an email notification for every push that is sent to the repository but if you’re using GitHub you don’t have access to Git server and you have to use GitHub special service for this.

As I said, fortunately, GitHub offers a service for this and you can enable this for multiple email addresses. Thanks to my friend, Farid Arzpeyma, who introduced this feature, I explain it a few simple steps:

1. Open GitHub and go to your repository (e.g. http://github.com/username/repo-name)
2. Click on Admin:
   
3. Click on “Service Hooks” then “Email”:
   
4. Enter as many email addresses you want them to receive notifications (separated by a space); leave Secret field empty; select “Send From Author” and “Active” check boxes.
   TIP: If you want to send notifications to more than two addresses you have to create a list address like devs@domain.com which includes all your developers’ email addresses and send notifications to this address.
5. Click “Update Settings”
6. You’re done!

Use Kindle for Android or iPad instead of buying a Kindle!

If you have an Android phone with a large enough screen (something like HTC Sensation XL or Galaxy Note) or an iPad, you can easily use Kindle for Android or Kindle for iPad and read books on your device but the tip I’d like to share with you is not just using this application but converting your own PDF eBooks to Kindle format to read them better on your device. If this made you curious read the rest

1. First download appropriate application for your device and install it.
2. Open the application and login to your account, this registers your device with your Amazon/Kindle account.
3. Go to Amazon.com and login.
4. Go to Manage Your Kindle.
5. Find your own @Kindle.com email address under Send-To-Kindle Email Settings as shown below:
   
6. Under “Approved Personal Document E-mail List” add your own email address from which you want to send your PDF files and documents.

You’re done! Now you can attach your own PDF file to an email with the word “Convert” in subject and send it to your @Kindle.com address. It will be converted automatically and will be available in your personal library within a few minutes!

One more tip is connecting your @Kindle.com email address with your Readability account and send articles over to your device