Social Networking sites are fun - but often they #fail in their UI/UX. I collect and report foibles on LinkedIn and Google+ already. Here are some on Pinterest (bet you saw this coming!)

Constant Contact URL (or Image Size ?) Suppresses Pin Photo

I tried to pin a page I viewed by clicking on a link in an email. The pin is successful, it is counted on the board, but the image is not displayed. Why? When I removed the Constant Contact (email marketing) tracking token from the URL, then the pin's image displayed. But then it went away too. Now I have a board with 7 pins, which only displays two pins:

But the cover, which also lists 7 pins, shows the dog image 4 times:

Or maybe the image is too large? It's 950px × 2,418px (and cute too)

Or maybe Pinterest is having some hiccups tonight, because when I tried to pin the small image above to a new board Error Screenshots the image doesn't display there either:

When I was unable to post to Twitter from my blog tonight, I found a very new thread on drupal.org discussing the issue: the Twitter API changed again!

I am only using the Twitter module on Drupal 6 sites right n   ow, I took two of the fixes and combined them in a patch for the 6.x-3.0-beta9 version. Then MinhH submitted new code that only requires a change in one place.

here's my latest patch for the 6.x-3.0-beta9 version

since the Twitter API is constantly changing, and the module is not very stable, always read the thread carefully to make sure you are applying the latest patch! Others have cleaned up the code I added from MinhH, and created a patch for the 6.x-3.x-dev branch which makes sense (however I suspect that 6.x-3.0-beta9 may be ahead of the -dev branch, and it's not a branch provided in the project's Github). Anyway, Open Source rocks, Murray!

and because my Twitter RSS feed URL was also broken, I found this post

https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/844

which provides an update to the URL format:

https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=decibelplaces

My wife wanted me to photocopy an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine titled What's Wrong With A Boy Who Wears A Dress? It seems her hairdresser's boyfriend's son is a "pink boy."

Since my printer was out of colored inks, and B&W wouldn't do it justice, I decided to use the ink cartridge refill kit I bought last year in a stingy mood.

Although I had lost the instructions, I found directions online. It was really very simple, if a bit messy.

cat and tequila optional

How I Came To Be Known As Decibel Places

I have used the handle netsperience as my "web brand" since 1996 - but when I decided to claim the domain, netsperience.com was already taken.

So I started to think about a good nickname for a programmer.

In the late 70s I occasionally published a xeroxed zine about the Providence, RI punk rock scene and I called it "Decibel Places"

Adding a decimal point completes the pun: I searched "decibel places" to see if anybody else was using it; I found one reference, clearly intended to be "decimal places" and I had a good laugh. Today, that result is buried at the bottom of the 17th page of Google results - the rest are me.

I switched my drupal.org username to "decibel.places" and everywhere else.

I created an avatar with the newly created obamicon.me by Paste Magazine. I was just playing around, using my laptop's webcam. I liked the side-lit effect, and the fact that the blue highlight on my face looks a lot like New Jersey.

LinkedIn suspended my account for using this as my profile image. I argued with them that it is an actual photo, but they would not allow it.

Recently my wife told me she doesn't understand what it means. I explained it to her: a double pun on my love for loud music and programming. "Oh," she said.

The only drawback is that many web sites like Twitter and Facebook do not allow a username with punctuation. (Facebook allows it in the URL but not as a user name.) Although this weakens the "joke" I think it actually improves search ranking with multiple spellings.

I have actually met people at meetups and parties who know me as "decibel" not by my real name. I guess it was a good marketing move. It's important to fully claim and establish your "brand" especially if it is your "personal" brand.

Someone should start a project documenting the origin of drupal.org usernames. How did chx pick the name? Besides what we think we know, what about merlinofchaos?

Due to catastrophic healthcare costs for a family member, I did not pay my cable bill and I have been using a neighbor's unsecured wifi identified only as NETGEAR (those default manufacturer name SSIDs are usually the ones that are not set up with passwords, along with Linksys, D-Link and Belkin).

But recently it started dropping my connection and reconnecting, so I decided to see if I could do anything about it. Of course, they left the default manufacturer password, so I logged in and ran a firmware upgrade:

Now the signal is much better, it doesn't drop out. Do you think my neighbor will notice a difference?

Social Networking sites like Google+ and LinkedIn are fantastic - but often they #fail in their UI/UX. I collect and report foibles on LinkedIn already. Here are some on Google+ (bet you saw this coming!) View my stream on Google+

Can't Add Circle - Come Back Tomorrow (and the next day, and the next...)

I tried "tomorrow" (today) and got the same message. It's like those signs in bars that say:

Free Beer! Come Back Tomorrow!

Can't Plus Google+

I used to be able to add Google+ to a post, I saw others add it today as a +link; it's not because it's public, tried without that...