odrakir.com

Much has been said since Facebook allowed the new “vanity URL’s” (or user url’s like I rather call it, since vanity urls is purely an american expression adopted from the vanity plates they have in their cars).

Most of the posts about this are from users bitching about the way Facebook roll out this feature, allowing the users to choose any alias to be used in http://www.facebook.com/whateveryouchoose regardless of their username, unlike Twitter that has http://www.twitter.com/username. Others rant about the fact that Facebook should have provided something like http://user.facebook.com, forgeting that Facebook has milions of users and something like that would have a termendous weight in their DNSs…

But, as always, there’s something good to learn. One of the posts I read about this subject (no link, sorry, can’t find it) mentioned a cool way to give your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, [insert your favorite social network here] URL’s to other people, that is, if you have your own domain.

In my case, my domain is odrakir.com, so I created some subdomains redirecting to the social networks I use the most:

• http://facebook.odrakir.com
• http://twitter.odrakir.com
• http://flickr.odrakir.com
• http://linkedin.odrakir.com
• http://delicious.odrakir.com

This way, I can give an url that’s easy to memorize and always mentions my “brand name”, cool enough to use on a visit card 🙂

Those who know me and follow me on the web might have noticed my “silence” in the last weeks. It all started in Codebits, I attended the first day and got a very ugly flu. I still managed to check some presentations and hang arround with the Prt.Sc crew, but I left around 19:30 or something with a heavy fever.

It took me a week to kill the flu and return to a decent state, lowering the fever from almost 40º to a regular body temperature. Excused to say that I didn’t follow Codebits the remaning days, nor did my usual blogging / twittering / feed reading. I barely had any interaction with the web (actually even with my computer) and this made me slow down and reduce the amount of time I dedicated to the social web.

I noticed that Twitter was consuming most of my online time, diverting my attention from other information that actually mattered, so I decided to make a “Twitter diet”. I first began to use Twitter to get updates on people and topics I was interested, but Twitter mutated drastically into IRC 2.0, not only you feed it a lot of info that is unnecessary, you also get back the same amount crap or more. I noticed that if some info worth of notice hit Twitter, it was also mentioned on blogs a few minutes later. The only difference was getting the info now or later.

All this allied to my heavy work load made me change the way I get info from the web.

Sure I miss Twittering with the usual crowed, getting the “gossip” and always being on top of the action, but it’s too much time and resource consuming… that really had to change. I’m now getting lighter on my work load and having more time to dedicate to my blogs. This “time off” was also useful to plot some plans to make 8-Bit Revolution evolve, you’ll have more info in a few weeks. Right now, I have to check WordPress 2.7 and see if upgrading is going to be bliss or hell 🙂