From the GReader twitter: New today: Create a custom feed in Reader to track changes on pages that don’t provide feeds. bit.ly/6n5MFJ

Sounds like a great way to track page changes for new versions and other infrequent updates.

jonwestfall: T-Mobile is down coast to coast – I’m not getting more… or any at all. Oh, and how do I know? Not the news, Twitter. Newsmedia Fail!

jonwestfall: Sitting at my desk in NYC, heading downtonw in 45 mins. @fyiguy & @johanvanmierlo ‘s twitter updates feels like watching realtime tracking.

So here

Automation still isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Case and point? The last post never made it to Twitter or anywhere else beyond this website. Perhaps this one will, but I’m not holding by breath.

Automation is pretty crazy. As I type this, I’m unsure what is actually going to happen when I hit Publish. You see, up until a week ago, I had a pretty jury rigged system where I posted something to a Joomla based CMS that was rather clunky, and then I twittered about it, and that twitter post went to my facebook status. Along the way a component for Joomla would download entries from my other blogs and Pocket PC Thoughts and dump them into the database. This seemed to work out pretty well, but I thought perhaps a more up-to-date system would be nice. Especially with all the changes coming up in the next few months, why not have a better site?
So I’m typing this in the backend of WordPress (Being on a Linux laptop I’m unable to use Windows Live Writer or Word right now), and I have a bunch of gizmos turned on to do various things. First of all, I’m tagging this with a Twitter tag, which I THINK is supposed to trigger some plugin I have to push this out to Twitter and a bunch of other websites (e.g. statuses on Facebook, Myspace, etc..). I’m not sure if it will work. At the same time, the same plugin should push this out as a note on Facebook, but who knows if it will (If you’re reading this there, then I guess it worked).

Now Twitter poses a bit of a problem for me because when this publishes out, I don’t want it sucked back in. Why would it do that? Well, my status updates need to be archived for glory on JonWestfall.Com, and if my status update advertises my blog item and then the status update actually upstages the blog item, it just creates a self-referential storm of junk on the homepage. So I hopefully found a solution using Yahoo! Pipes that should block from my twitter feed any items with [JonWestfall.Com] in them from EVER appearing back on the homepage. Ugh.

If this sounds confusing, that’s because it really is. All I want is everything I write to A) appear on JonWestfall.Com in some form and B) my friends to know I’ve posted something (in whatever medium they’re using or accessing). I guess those two are mutually exclusive to some extent. So what will happen when I press “Publish”? Who knows, but hopefully something good.

This is my 200th twitter update. 200 times I’ve shared something probably best left unshared

@DarrenHumphries I did, hence the follow up tweet from a worse location.