Many of you have joined Twitter over the past few months, and it has been a lot of fun seeing what you are up to each day. Well, like many of you, I have a Facebook account as well. Facebook has a feature called “Status Updates,” which is basically the same thing as Twitter (except without IM or SMS support, cool desktop clients, etc). I thought that it would be neat if I could get the Facebook Status Updates of my friends to show up in my Twitter. Then I would be able to follow many more of my friends. So, a couple of months ago I came up with this little hack.
The Status Updates of all my friends are conveniently placed in an RSS feed by Facebook. I then found a service called Twitterfeed that takes any RSS feed and posts the entries to a Twitter account. This is exactly what I needed. However, in order to follow these updates, I had to create another Twitter account that I would send the updates to. Then I would follow that user. This ended up working great, and I have been getting constant updates from my friends. However, I have not set up anything to enable my Facebook friends to see Twitter posts in my Status Updates. There is a Twitter application for Facebook though, which works fine for me.
It seems that I am not the only person that has thought to do this though. I was listening to net@nite (episode 28, 49:50) the other day and caller mentioned this same hack. I realized that there are probably others that would like to do this, so decided to write this post.
Yes that is right, Jenny and I are coming back to Canada. After a day of legal document calisthenics I have Canadian student and work visas, as well as a job at TWU. I will be doing ASP.NET programming for the financial aid department for about a year. Jenny and I are excited to be back up there with many of our friends, as well as having the opportunity to continue to attend Vintage.242.Church. I start the 8th of August, and we will be looking for a place in the area on the US or Canada side.
The wedding invitations are printed and getting sent out, while I am back to looking for a job again. The printing process was quite an ordeal, but I think they turned pretty nice. I have been all over the west coast the last few weekends. Last weekend I was in Seattle, Lynden, Abbotsford, Langley, Vancouver, and Portland, with specific stops at each of those. The weekend before that I was in Northern California for a wedding, and tomorrow I head up to Vancouver again for an interview. Gas is adding up, especially for someone without a job, but thankfully the price is going down a little.
This week I have been helping out a little at Masterworks, where I worked last summer, to make a little cash. That has been fun seeing everyone again, but getting back into the early mornings is a little hard. Tonight I am in Seattle for a Seattle Ruby Brigade meeting. Those have been fun for meeting new people, and learning more about the Ruby community. I have also been attending the newly formed Kitsap.rb meetings. However, if things in Canada work out, I won’t be able to attend these meetings anymore. Though I did meet a guy that drives down from Chillawack for the meetings.
Things are getting busy as the wedding approaches. I am still looking for a job, invitations need to get out, and tons of things need to be planned. During all this though, I have found the time to put together a little site with information about our wedding. There is a bios page for people that may not know much about one of us, a page giving details about the proposal, and of course, wedding information, complete with suggested accommodations and a form for RSVP-ing. So go take a look at it, and be sure to check back, as we will continue to update it.
This last weekend I attended RailsConf 2007 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. The conference was all about Ruby on Rails, a pretty new web framework. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means, let’s just say that Rails uses the Ruby programming language, and allows you to make cool sites more quickly. For example, Twitter has been developed using RoR, along with a host of other ‘Web 2.0‘ sites.
The weekend began with a tutorial day with Dave Thomas and Mike Clark, authors of the highly influential book written on Rails. It was a great refresher course to get me ready for the weekend. Another cool thing is that they donated their time, and then had us donate our fees for the tutorial to a charity of our choice. Over the weekend, everyone else was also encouraged to donate as well, and we ended up raising over $33,000.
The conference began on Friday with a keynote given by the 28 year old creator of Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson (or DHH for short). The days were filled with sessions on many different topics related to Rails. And Friday night featured a keynote given by comedic internet star Ze Frank. Another highlight of the weekend was the surprise performance of an alternative marching band, Extra Action, from San Francisco. I also had the opportunity to talk to numerous people about job opportunities, and make some other contacts.
My friends Dave and Chris also made it down for the weekend from Canada, and Jenny and I had the opportunity to hang out with them for a couple days. We explored Portland by riding the MAX in from out hotel in a sketchier side of town. Great weekend, and hopefully I will be able to RailsConf next year.