I checked out iTwitter, only to be disappointed when I found out that you only receive push notifications if another iTwitter app user mentions or DMs you. If anyone wants to follow me and play with it, I'm @bitful.

The disappointment did not last long, however, as I discovered that iTwitter is an iPhone application with a very attractive simplicity that fits the way I use Twitter on my iPhone very well. That is, I want to do few things, and I want them to be super easy (and work well).

Main functions

The first screen you see is the last you were looking at upon quitting the application after the previous use. I tend to leave it in the 'Home' screen that shows your friends' timeline and only four options:

• refresh
• mark all as read
• delete
• compose tweet

If you tap on a tweet, a few options pop up:

• go to the URLs mentioned in the tweet
• reply
• retweet
• favourite

Very handy if you have large fingers like me and have trouble tapping on tiny icons or URLs.

You need to go up one menu to select, among other options, to view mentions and direct messages. Here you can also start a search, which can be saved and it will then appear on this menu. This menu also lets you access an address book with everyone you follow, and another with everyone who follows you.

Direct messages

The only way I found to send a DM is by tapping on a name in the Following or Followers address book, which involves too many clicks and is also confusing because as far as I know, you can only DM people who follow you. I haven't tried it yet though.

@Reply threads

iTwitter sticks the original tweet (with smaller font and avatar) underneath its reply, which I think is incredibly useful when people reply to you, especially if you tweet a lot and the replies are a simple 'Ditto' or 'LOL'. Unfortunately it only works if you follow the person who sent the original tweet.

Multiple accounts

You can add more than one account but you will have to move up to the top-level menu to switch between accounts. Again, not something I need.

I like this application and will probably stick to it. For the record, lately I have been using TweetDeck on the iPhone, which has a killer feature of displaying tweets grouped by whatever criteria you want. But I have recently unfollowed 40 accounts and I now get everything I want to read, nothing less, nothing more, so TweetDeck was largely unused.

I have known for a long time that I (and most people I know) now blog in a different way from when I started in 2001. I don't need a blog to share links to cool stuff I found, post my photos or write a quick update on what I am doing, because this is now taken care of by (among others) Delicious, Flickr and Twitter.

You can of course subscribe to my Delicious bookmarks, add me as a contact on Flickr and follow me on Twitter. Or, if you like coming to this site, you can from now on dip into my activities by looking my Friendfeed activity in the sidebar.

I have also decided to switch to an automatic blogroll that displays all the websites I have tagged with 'blogroll' in Google Reader. These are my 'must reads' that I always find some time for.

I have removed the list of category and monthly archives from the homepage, and moved them to a dedicated 'Archives' page that you can access from any page on this site, and where you will find all the entries by date and by category, as well as a list of the most commented posts.

Similarly, I have moved some of the content in an enhanced 'About' section, and collected the feeds that you can subscribe to in their own page. Did you know that as well as subscribing to the main entries and the comments feed, you can also access my Google Reader shared items (mostly design ideas and gadgets) and all the entries from the sites in my blogroll? Have a look at the feeds page to find out more.

All the content is still here and there are ways to find it even if it is not linked to from every page. If you are a regular user of this site I'd be very happy if you could leave a comment here to let me know what you think.

That's… two years! And possibly the longest I have enjoyed doing something for, which makes me wonder how I managed to do that. I believe that it is because I did not set out to do something special, but shared my innate curiosity with others, via a very simple method.

The process I developed is the easiest I could think of. Whenever I learn something new during the course of the week, I send myself an email. Since most of the time this happens while I am online, this is as easy as sending a link to the page I am on. Most weeks I collect more than seven items, so I rarely have to start looking for ideas.

I have experimented with Gmail filters, labels, custom-made email addresses and saved searches, but in the end I went for the simplest possible solution: when I send these emails to myself, I stick in the subject line a special made-up word that triggers a rule that marks the email as read and archives it. I found it had to be a unique word to avoid false positives coming up in search results. Then, when I am ready to write the post in WordPress I fire up Gmail, search for that made-up word and find all the notes I sent myself on the subject. Once I have blogged them, I delete the email.

You can use the same system to track anything you like. I regularly use it to capture ideas and notes on the go, and to track the cash I spend and food I eat if I am on a diet. Then, once a week or so, I sit down and report the data if needed, extracting it from Gmail as above.

I hope you enjoy reading my '7 things' posts as much as I enjoy putting them together for you.

Microsoft Outlook, which unfortunately I still have to use at work, is one of those cases where software got so complicated and riddled with options that yes, you can do hundreds of things, but sadly none very easily or quickly. Search is one of them.

Outlook's simple search toolbar lets me down because:

• it only searches within the folder you are in (not within subfolders);
• it only searches content in the subject line;
• if I perform a search, then move to another folder, I lose my search results.

The one good thing about Windows Vista is its indexing and search functionality, but we run XP at work, and unfortunately I am not allowed to install indexing software on my machine, so alas, no Google Desktop.

My solution (more like a workaround really): Outlook's advanced search. I bring it up by typing Ctrl-Shift-F (this opens a new window), type my keyword(s) and press the Enter key. All results appear in a new window (so I can continue working in my main one), and subfolders are scanned by default.

This way you still only look for content in the subject line, but I am happy with that, because I want messages that deal primarily with what I am looking for, rather than mention it incidentally. The problem here is that very often the subject line is not representative of the content, such as 'fruit' or 'Sharing is caring' (real subject lines of non-personal messages I have received at work lately).

Fortunately, Outlook lets you edit the subject line of emails you have received. I therefore recently went through the messages I needed to keep for reference (not very many, I try and delete as many as I can) and added a few keywords to the original subject line, wrapped in brackets to separate them from it. So the subject lines above (real examples from my 'archive' folder) have become 'fruit (character encoding info utf8)' and 'Sharing is caring (uxd brainstorming notes contextual navigation shared drive folder)'. I keep the original title so that if I need to reply or forward the message I can delete my own keywords.

I think I first read about this method on Lifehacker: Make Outlook email messages more searchable.

I have now developed the habit of changing the subject line when I am done with a message and I want to archive it (Ctrl-shift-V, then select the folder where you 'archive' read mail that you keep for reference), and every time I need to bring up old info, I can access it with a few keystrokes.

It feels good and efficient, and yet every time I do that, I wish that I could just use Gmail at work too.

I have not looked back once since. I just took a few precautions: just to name a couple, my Gmail account automatically backs up with Zoho, and I chose to use a paying service (JungleDisk interfacing Amazon Simple Storage) to back up documents and photos once a week.

I have just come across one of the articles that originally sparked my curiosity in putting data out there: How To Live the Cloud Life, by Paul Stamatiou. It is a treasure chest full of tips and links to applications and services that will make it easy for you too to adopt this lifestyle.

Within the space of a couple of weeks last month I received a handful of emails informing me, dear user, that such and such service is closing (either for good or just until the big cheese that bought it decides what to do with it).

Fortunately, I seem to have stuck with services that are either stronger or more complete (or sometimes simpler, doing just one thing but doing it very well), and that are therefore doing OK. So I am sorry to see it go but I won't miss I Want Sandy because I use Remember The Milk. And I will survive very well without Stikkit thanks to Evernote. And Pownce has never been but a promising but unused sort of Twitter on steroids, whereas the original thing (with all its epic fail whales) is still among my favourites.

I removed some redirects from the .htaccess file and it is now working again and finally showing my last eight posts.

I should reinstall the redirects one by one to find out exactly where the loop was created (in very simple terms, when you ask for page A you get redirected to page B which in turn redirects to page A), but I have to shoot off to work… to find a fix for what is broken there.

I am so looking forward to five days of food, sleep and good company with Dr B.'s family over Christmas, where the most challenging technological task will be switching channels on Sky.

I only found out today while checking out broken links using Google Webmaster Tools, which lists external sites that link to your own.

Here is the chart for my Twitter feed:

If the time on the chart is right, it appears that I tweet mainly on a Saturday and generally between 6 and 8pm.

Via Micro Persuasion.

It was a very easy task, as simple as dragging them from 'Personal Folders' to the IMAP 'Gmail/All Mail' folder, then doing the same from Sent Items to 'Gmail/Sent Mail'. It took a while, but now all my emails are available online, and I can access them from any machine, including my iPhone.

Why have I done this? Because I like keeping similar things in one place, and because with Gmail's fast and advanced search it is much easier to find what I am looking for.

Email duplication

By doing this, a portion of my messages (those received since I started using Gmail and before I stopped using Outlook a few months ago) have now been duplicated in Gmail. Upon investigation they appear to differ only by some elements of text formatting (extra line breaks), which is probably why software such as Duplicate Email Remover for Outlook failed to identify them.

After a bit of fiddling around, I chose to live with it – Gmail groups duplicates in one conversation anyway.

What if Google goes bust?

If Google loses your email, closes/locks your account, or the service is simply down, you will have no way to retrieve your messages. If that scares you, you might want to keep your Gmail account in sync with Zoho (painlessly via POP mail).

Alternatively, you could see the loss of all your emails as a welcome opportunity to start afresh with a clean slate, like a very wise former colleague of mine said when we were discussing pros and cons of keeping all your data 'in the cloud'.