Brizzly is a web-based Twitter client, one of the best one in my point of view. It’s still in private beta, requiring invitation code to sign up, you can submit your email address here and wait to be invited to join in. I got to know this because a Chinese Twitter user Young Yang introduced it on Twitter with a invitation code in the other day. I’ve checked it out over the last week, and have really come to enjoy it.

Brizzly has a very good user interface, brings you the best tweeting experiences. You can publish your tweets (tell others what you’re doing or thinking), read messages which contain “@YourTwitterUsername” (@ messages), read tweets you marked as “Favourites”, and read/write direct messages to other Twitter users. You can also search tweets or people you follow, manage the people you are folloing  in groups. All these features come in one place, and, with multi-twitter account support. It’s quite useful.

Brizzly is not just a Twitter client, but it’s also a photo sharing service based on Twitter: You can upload your own photos to Brizzly severs and publish the photo link along together with any message you enter and share it out on Twitter between your followers. This is a very good service that I prefer, instead of twitpic, but all-in-one.

Another reason why I prefer Brizzly so much is its real-time stream feature, if a new tweet contains a link with videos or images, or you uploaded a photo to Brizzly sever and published it, Brizzly will automactically recogize it’s source link and embed it and displays the images or video together with your tweets you newly published or new messages published  by the people your are following. (as far as I know, I’ve confirmed that brizzly displays photos from YFrog and TwitPic and that it pulls in YouTube videos.)

Brizzly automatically resolves shortened urls. For example, when you post a tweet on brizzly with a long url, brizzly will automatically turns it into a Bit.ly shortened url; On the other hand, if the one you’re following posted a shorted url on Twitter, when Brizzly displays it to you, it will reconvert it to the full long url.

In one word, Brizzly is a very good web-based Twitter worthy for you to have a try. Please try to be invited first

Linda was my classmate when I was studying in XFU, and we worked in the same city after graduation. I always went to her school on Sundays where she worked in the last months, we went shopping in supermarkets, climbing on the hills around her school, or going to parks in her city… That’s the most happiest time for me working in this city during the last years.

For quite a long time, Linda was my best female friend, yes, only her whom could accompany me. I was a stranger of the city, and I was always busy on working in my company, almost sitting everyday at front of my office computers except on Sundays. Linda has plenty of time, and we could gather together.

Eveything had changed since last month, because he went back home to Shaanxi. Her boyfriend came here and took her home. On the previous day when she left, she came to my company and saw me, she told me she didn’t want working outside any longer for so long a distance. She already planned to do something to make a living with her boyfriend.

They will be probably get married this year or so, that’s great, but I will be lonely again…

Give Ubuntu Jaunty An Apple Flavour A lot of people like to dress up their Linux (Gnome) computer with a Mac OS X interface. One way that I learned is to install Mac4Lin theme, I tried this before, but I don’t like Mac4Lin interface. Well, this article gives Gnome a fresh new look, and, it’s similar to Mac.

Schedule & Automate Tasks In Linux With Gnome Schedule I know a tool which called crontab, which can execute commands or scripts automatically at a specified time/date, so that you are allowed to do some things repeatedly on your computer and automactically, to use crontab, you must learn some Linux commands, because crontab is a command line based program. I like doing some basic job in terminal, but I hate commands, because I know only a little.

Well, if you don’t like Terminal either, you can try Gnome Schedule. This is a graphical equivalent of the crontab, which you can use it very easily. Here is a howto which you can learn from it.

How time flies, A new week is coming, but in my mind, we just celebrated our Chinese new year, celebated Lantern Festival, spent my awful date of birth, but it’s already been March 1st today, that means we have passed 1/6 of the entire year. I’m alraedy 24 years old now, I don’t know how fast my rest of life will be spent.

Last week, I finnally sent all my orders out, but every order with some items left, which can’t be able to go through Chinese customs, that’s a great headache to me. I hate this job, it’s hard to get an order, and the goods I’m selling has a great problem at customs in any country too. A large order of mine was still held at the US customs without any solutions, I’m still worried about that.

Life is boring, doing so many things repeatly again and again, and almost all things I’m doing here is not smoothly. I hate my job, I hate my life, but anyway, I’m here this morning still in the office at my desk.

Life is hard, but, I will do my best and enjoy everyday as a holiday.

Have you ever been addicted to a certain website? You visit this website again and again for times a day, and this habit makes you very hard to concentrat on your work? If so, try KeepMeOut, KeepMeOut is a very simple online severice which is, I think, very helpful for you to break the habit of visiting a certain or any other websites.

KeepMeOut is very easy to use, just input the URL of the website that you’re addicted to, and, bookmark the new KeepMeOut alias in your broswer, when you want to visit that site, you visit the bookmarked URL, KeepMeOut will not allow you to visit that site again if the time not expired as you told it…

“I am hungry now, could you please give me something to eat?”

“Thanks. the food is very delicious, I am full now…”

“I ate too much just now, I am so full, I can’t move now. Don’t disturb me, let me have a sleep”

“Oh, it’s so comfortable lieing here”

“Hello, I saw you, nice to see you again, thanks for your delicious foods”

“Hmmm, I really don’t want to go, don’t leave me alone…”

This is not my dog, but how I wish I have such a cute dog…

Dog & Cat

Oh, the girl is being… it seems it’s Photoshoped…

Do you ever hear about Micro-blogging? Perhaps you don’t know this concept, but I guess you know Twitter, and you are probably a user and fan of it. Twitter is one of the most popular Web 2.0 online services, it allows you to send brief text updates (no more than 140 characters) or photos, audio and video clips and publish them. Compared with a traditional blog, the content of micro-blogging is typically more topical, smaller in aggregate file size. It’s just because of this distinctive feature, I like writing a micro-blogging.

Do you ever know WordPress? It’s one of the most popular open-source blog publishing platform, with WordPress, you can easily build a self-hosted blog only if you have a domain of your own, as well as a hosting which supports PHP and MySQL database. WordPress is a blog software which is very easy to install, to use, and to upgrade, and to manage all of your blog posts.

I recommend Bluehost as your affordable, reliable blog hosting solutions, only 6.95 USD/Mon, fast and stable! It offers Unlimited disk storage, Unlimited monthly data transfer, host unlimited domains on 1 account, 1 free domain name for as long as you host with Bluehost, 2500 POP / WebMail addresses, 50 MySQL databases… One of the most amazing facture of Bluehost is it’s WordPress Auto Install, to install wordpress on your Bluehost account, the only thing you must do is just 1 lick of you mouse. (Of course, WordPress is very easy to install, even if it has no such feature)

More and more people nowadays, including some world’s top bloggers choose WordPress as their primary bog publishing system, me too, I have several wordpress-based blogs (tradition blog), WordPress itself is a very powerful blog publishing application that allows you do almost anything with its flexible expandability. This is a howto to build a microbloging system of your own, based on WordPress. Our aim is to build a WordPress blog that you can publish small text entries at the front page of your blog, wih tags and multiuser support (as you wish), here we go.

Firstly, you need to install your WordPress, I think you’ve already done, thanks to Bluehost for the Auto Install feature. (Well if you are new to wordpress, you can search some tutorials on Google, there’re so many tutorial that you can take a review). Secondly, please download Twittress WordPress theme, decompress the archive, and uploaded the whole directory called twittress to your own wordpress /wp-content/themes directory. Thirdly, you need to download a wordpress plugin called PageBar (it’s necessary and required), uploadthe decompressed directory to your own wordpress /wp-content/plugins directory. Log in in your own WordPress Dashboard, active the the PageBar plugin and active the Twittress theme.

Twittress wordpress theme is designed by a well-known Chinese blogger Jason NG, it’s based on another famous wordpress theme called Prologue, but it has a better looking becuase of its Fanfou (A Chinese “Twitter”) css clone.

Now, type your own wordpress blog url in your browser you will see your own microblogging, is it nice looking? Now you can input your wordpress username and password at the sidebar and have a test of the text updates feature, if you want to insert micromedia contents to your micro-blog, it’s also no problem, but you need to log in your wordpress dashboard to do that.

Your microbogging is simple, clean enough, you may probably like, but for a better reading and writing experiences, you need only to do the following things:

1. Replace the image about.png in your own /wp-content/themes/twittress/i/ directory with your own microblogging logo

2. Change New User Defulat Role to “Author” in Settings/General (it’s somewhat optional, it’s required only if ou want others to register on your blog and post their own updates)

3. Customize your micro-blogging url structure as /%year%/%monthnum%/%post_id%/ in Settings/Permalinks, it’s much better as anyone will know the exactly date that you post this update from the permalink of your single update url.

4. Make some nessary changes of your PageBar wordpress plugin in Settings/Pagebar, so that it looks the same as mine. ( Take my own microbloging http://m.pengjiayou.com as a reference.

After the above settings, you own micro-blogging is much perfect now… I think, but someone still can’t give up their Twitter account, because they have a lot of friends on Twitter, this is no problem either, there are so many Twitter tools, one of the awesome tool that can post your blog entries from your blog RSS feed to your twitter account.

This tool is called TwitterFeed, it checks your blog feed at the specified interval and post any new items to your twitter account. This could be very useful, I mean, you can then submit your blog rss feed address to twitterfeed, it will check your your feed for new updates and then sync it to your twitter account.

It means, your updates on your own microblogging, will appear on your twitter account automactically. Isn’t it amazing?

Well, I found another WordPress which does the same as Twittress, please take a review of the T1 Tumblelog Theme for WordPress here. You can have a try yourself. Here’s a conclusion of the resources that you can easily build a micro-blogging, which included:

• WordPress blog pubblishing software
• Twittress WordPress theme
• Pagebar WordPress plugin
• Twitterfeed (Optional tool for snycing your updates to your twitter account)
• T1 Tumblelog Theme for WordPress (Optional, it’s another wordpress themes for a wordpress-based microblogging system)
• Prologue Theme (Optional, it’s a wordpress micro-blogging theme, Twittress is just based on it)

Well, the end, please don’t forget to have a visit of my own microblogging, http://m.pengjiayou.com and my twitter account is http://twitter.com/charlespeng

A tumblelog is a variation of a blog that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, tumblelogs are frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences while providing little or no commentary.

A micro-blogging is a form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send brief text updates (say, 140 characters or fewer) or micromedia such as photos or audio clips and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, MP3 or the web.

The content of a micro-blog differs from a traditional blog due in that it is typically more topical, smaller in aggregate file size (e.g. text, audio or video) but is the same in that people utilize it for both business and individual reasons. Many micro-blogs provide this short commentary on a person-to-person level, or share news about a company’s products and services.

Micro-blogging is represented by Twitter, which I have my own solutions, you can easily start your own micro-blogging by WordPress plus a Twittress theme. While for tumblelog, it’s represented by Tumblr, as we can post pictures, videos, links, audios, etc under the tumblelog concept, compared with a micro-blogging, I prefer tumblelog much more. I found an open source tumblog platform this morning, and launched my own self-hosted tumblog…

Gelatocms is a very good open source tumblog platform that you’ll probably like too, it’s based on AJAX, PHP and MySQL, very easy to install and use, you can download the source code and install it in several minutes.

My own tumblelog is: http://my.charlespeng.com . As you can see in the above screenshot, it has all fuctions that Tumblr brings us, exactly speaking, it’s just a Tumblr colone. Unluckily, Tumblr is blocked in China, my customised domain name http://just.charlespeng.com can’t be opened, gelatocms has a fuction to import RSS Feeds, that’s why all posts in my Tumblr account can be outputed on this self-hosted tumblelog. (My host is also in the US, tumblelog can read tumblr rss)

Tumblelog and micro-blogging is hard to distinguish, in my point of view, you can publish micro media content to your tumblelog, while micro-blogging only text messages. We have another concept called lifestream too… Lifestreaming is presented by FriendFeed, it’s a web-based online RSS Aggregator to integrate your Twitter, Flickr, your blog rss, as well as other RSS feeds of your frequently used web 2.0 services  together into one place, and output in chronological order.

If you want to set up a friendfeed-like site of your own, I recommend another opensource software called Sweetcron, you can take my own lifestreaming site http://life.pengjiayou.com for your reference.

Free online tumblelog and lifestream serces included:

tumblr

soup.io

weguan

bloglove

storytlr

publr

jot.ly

meemi

posterous

twimbler

streem.us

ticketapp

flaker.pl

jaanix

scribblelive(live-blogging)

snappler(for mobile)

smalltalkr(tumblelog like )

Opensource softwares included:

gelatocms(PHP)
asaph(PHP)
indexhibit(PHP)
ozimodo(Ruby)
aintablog(Ruby)
chyrp(PHP)
nukumi2 (Ruby)
TB(Python)
sweetcron(PHP)

You can choose anyone you like to start your own…

My girlfriend is a typical USTC girl in that she dates a white guy like me. Chinese girls who date and marry white guys are quite common in the U.S., but I have never ever seen or heard of a Chinese guy date a white girl.

So I have a couple of questions for you Chinese:

1) Why do Chinese girls prefer white guys so much? When I was visiting China with my white American friends, we were mobbed like rock stars by Chinese girls.

My girlfriend said the majority of her USTC female classmates are dating or married to white guys. Do Chinese girls think white guys have more money, social status, or have better sex than Chinese guys? No offense to Chinese guys, but through my girlfriend I know so many Chinese girls from P.R.China (not American Born Chinese) who explicitly say they prefer white guys over Chinese guys.

Chinese men: does that piss you off when you see Chinese girls throw themselves at white guys? What will happen when China’s gender imbalance cause millions of Chinese men to never be able to find wives, and so many Chinese girls are already dating or married to white guys?

2) How come there are no Chinese guy/white girl relationships? Are Chinese men not interested in white girls, or have you tried dating a white girl but was rejected? Again, no offense to Chinese men, I just want to know.

I don’t mean to offend anyone, I am just curious.

Ed Pultar
Georgia Tech alum

I also found this interesting video on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpEipgoZ3Kk

[youtube EpEipgoZ3Kk]

After watched this funny video, I got the conclusion why Chinese girls marry white guys: I agree with Ed’s opinion, white guys have money and social status, girls like rich guys only, no matter what country he’s from, what nationality and what race he is, if you give her money, she wil do anything with you…

But for Chinese guys, for myself, I don’t like white guys, if I marry a white girl, my father and mother will drive me out of home, and can never be back again. I am a traditional Chinese man, I don’t accept a marrage with a wite girl or any other guys from other countries, this is our traditional culture, many many guys have same opinion with me, but for a Chinese girl, things are quite different in our eyes.