Interestingly, I read Scott Hanselman’s post a few weeks ago, and figured I’d give it another go. I’ve been using it for almost a month now, and I’m finding that I’m not alone when I say that after a second look, I finally see the value in it.

I think the problem is that it’s explained as a micro-blog, and so it spawns imagery of “I’m at the Belgian for a beer if you want to join me.” kind of posts. This is one side of Twitter, but I believe the real value comes from applying Rule 2 from Scott’s post: Search.

All of a sudden, the focus shifts, and it’s no longer about only seeing tweets from the people you follow. Now you’re part of a larger conversation, and this is where hashtags come in. By searching on hashtags that you’re interested in you can take part of a geographically disconnected conversation in real time about whatever it is that interests you.

For example, I currently have searches in my TweetDeck on:

#PowerShell
#Ashes
#Win7
“#MDT 2010″ OR “SCCM 2007″

Popular hashtags can be seen here.

I’ve been on Facebook for a while now, and whereas I love seeing the updates from friends, and what everyone is up to, I really have no time for all the other gaming and features that seem to fill up my profile. To me, Twitter is the useful status feature of Facebook, but in a real time.

So, thanks to Scott for his post, and if you find yourself on Twitter feel free to add me: http://www.twitter.com/leadfollowmove

Recently I moved to using Google Reader because I can use it wherever I happen to be. It’s also platform independent, which is quite handy.

Well, one of the cool features of using Google Reader is the ability to share posts that I come across that might be of interest to, well, you guys I guess ;) So there’s a funky widget in the Sidebar. Google call it a Clip. Let me know what you think.

To rectify this I started to hunt around the interweb for a WordPress Plugin to resolve the situation. I was amazed at how difficult this turned out to be. I spent several hours trying to find a good solution.

Now to be fair I could well have been doing something wrong in this process, but I checked out the Codex Syntax Highlighting Plugins and worked my way through a a few I’d found on Google.

There were a few contenders that looked like they might do the trick, but they either didn’t work as I thought (trimmed white spaces, lost formatting), or appeared a little complex to install and get working. To be fair I didn’t try them all, I just picked out a few that I thought might suit my needs.

I liked Aaron’s Code-Viewer, which let you display code from a file on the server, and make it available for download. This was nice, and I like the idea. I didn’t like how I couldn’t make the numbering go away, or that, for me, the indentation formatting was lost. I was getting warmer though!

I was impressed by this Simple Code page, and was just about to test the plugin version, when I stumbled across Chrissy’s Quick Code.

I have to say I’m really impressed. It was a snap to install, and it’s simple to use. Now I’m not really that fazed by pretty colouring of keywords etc. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t knock it if a plugin had it, but I’m really stoked with the show/hide functionality of the DIV container, and just the general way it behaves and can be configured. Oh and did I mention that it just displays my code without mangling it? Yup, no trimmed white spaces, it handles long lines, and it has just a nice crisp display.

Kudos! Well done Chrissy, and thanks!