Jepla.com

Twitter... 140 character long messages and immensly popular. But how come it's so popular, which influences did it have on the internet and society of today?

Let your users post short messages of maximum 140 characters and let them follow each other. The idea is incredibly simple yet Twitter managed to get millions of people doing this. But why do we do this? Why are we so interested in other people's lives and why do we want to share what we do and think with the whole world?

I'm sure there will be some evolutionary theory behind it, but since I'm not a psychiatrist or something like that, I can only speak for myself. There are three reasons why I'm a Tweeter.

1. Learning: I follow quite a lot webdevelopers, PHP news accounts, webtrends-accounts, ... When something new or interesting pops up, I'm one of the first to know, to read about it and to keep in touch with the subject. I'm constantly learning and discovering new things.
2. News: Twitter is known for the speed news is spreading across the network. If something important or even less important is happening in the world, it'll be on Twitter before it's on the regular newssites. On a personal note, I even follow Twitter-account of newssites which also have an RSS-feed. Then why follow them twice? Because of the speed. My Twitter-timeline is always open (with a browserplugin or an application), but my feedreader isn't. I quickly get all newsflashes and in one or two sentences I know what's going on.
3. Networking: As said before: I follow quite a lot webdevelopers and I also get followed by other webdevelopers. News about this subject and conferences in the near future are announced and quickly spread across the network. Ask a question when you have a problem or a remark and you'll quickly get answers from people in the same business.

I do realize these are mostly reasons to read tweets, but why do I post messages? Well, same reason other people blog: because I want to say something, because I thought of something, because something happened, ...  Blogposts are mostly somewhat longer than one or two sentences, but not every subject is worth a complete post and that's where Twitter comes in.

Ofcourse Twitter alse has it's downsides. An item that came up in the news today was the case of Stephen Fry, the British actor-comedian-writer. Someone told Fry his tweets were boring, making him feel a bit miserable. A little bit of criticism isn't that bad, but it show what Twitter can do. There are many examples where the service is used to inform people about (extreme?) political views, to organise protests against the government or to spread gossip.

Not only Twitter grew quickly, but some companies also created services to help Tweeters post their messages. There's an application for every platform you can think of, there are services which lets you easily post pictures, videos and links, ... Even search engines start indexing tweets and thanks to the API everyone is able to create their own killer-app or -service.

It's clear Twitter has had an immensive impact on the social networking and the use of internet, but whether you want to use it is completely up to you. And once you have an account and if you liked this post, you can always start following me at http://twitter.com/JelleLampaert. Or did you really think I would write all of this without some shameless self promotion ;-)

As you might (or might not) have noticed, some things have changed around here.

Firstly, there's a new design. I've ditched the old, fixed width design and replaced it with a new liquid design which gives more room for the content.

Secondly, the code behind this blog has been completely rewritten. I wanted a system that's easily reusable and what's better to start with, than with my own blog. For those who want some technical details:

• Lots and lots of OO
• Makes use of the Registry-pattern
• Easy URL-rewriting
• Single entry-point
• ...

Not everything is ready just yet. For now, there's only a blog and a quick about-section available. When I have some time, I'll add the tutorials and portfolio-section again too. Shouldn't be that much work I hope.

Just a quick message saying this website (and the @jepla.com e-mail addresses) will be off-line for a short time later this week.

Another year of jepla.com has ended, and it's time to renew the domainname and hosting plan. Since I was hosted on a reseller account of Pieter, and he decided not to make the investments in a renewal, I'm moving the whole domain to the same hosting plan as my Android-website.

I expect there will be a short downtime while the domain gets transferred, but I'm making preparations to make the move as smooth as possible.

I know, it's been an awful long time ago since I've last blogged here, but it's been a busy few weeks. I'm hoping to find some more time now to do this. Let me first just give a quick overview of what has happened during the last two months.

• As I already said in the previous post, I found a job as a webdeveloper in an advertising company in Ghent.
• Not only am I working this full-time job, I also started working on my own. I can now officially repair and sell computers and create applications and websites.
• There have been some updates on my Android-website and there are more to come.
• Some bugs on the Cobalt-website have been squashed, and a new feature has been added (but not yet activated for users)

Now there are probably another 1000 things I've forgotten, but these have taken a big part of my time lately, which was partly the cause of me not adding anymore blogposts. Who'd liked to know what I'd been up to, could of course just follow me on Twitter. To make things easy, I've now even added the five latests posts in the sidebar left of this post.

Yesterday it has started again. During the next ten days (well, nine still left) Ghent is having it's annual Gentse Feesten.

For those not familiar with the concept, the Gentse Feesten is one of the biggest cultural festivals in the world. During the ten days, everyone who wants to can enjoy music, theatre, street acts, expositions, ... Most of the approx. 4000 activities are for free, some of them are open for a small fee. The concept has been proven a massive succes which attracts almost two million visitors.

Since I started working this week (more about it in a post later this week), I'm walking through the city every day now, and it's been wonderful seeing the city change every hour. Everywhere you looked people were running around, unloading trucks, building, ... You could enter the city in the morning, passing an open space, and when you leave the city eight hours later, there suddenly has arisen a complete stage, followed by some gigantic stage equipment during your lunch break the next day.

I wasn't able to go to the actual festivities myself yesterday, but I surely will this week. Of course I'll be there during my work, but I'm definately planning to stay some hours in Ghent afterwards.