Twhirl is one of the many twitter clients. Unlike many other clients, twhirl is easy to use.

I assume you are on twitter (after all who is not in twitter these days?). Though many people prefer tweeting through the web, using a twitter client will increase your productivity.

Though there are many twitter clients, I have always preferred to use Tweetdeck. But for the last few days tweetdeck was not working for me and I had to switch to twhirl.

Twhirl is simple and makes tweeting fun. But if you are new to twhirl or thinking of giving twhirl a try, these are 5 basic settings that you should change in twhirl for better tweeting.

1. API limit

Go to settings and you will see an option called network. In this you can set the API limit. You cannot set twhirl (or any application for that matter) to update once every few seconds. If you do, you will reach the API limits and you won’t be able to tweet using the client for sometime. The API normally resets every one hour.

In this API, set how many requests you need per hour. I have set it to 30 requests per hour as you can see in the image. Once you do this, twhirl will automatically adjust the options that are following based on the requests you have set per hour.

I have disabled it for direct messages because I get DM notifications to my mail. I want to reply quickly to people who @ me and that is the reason why I have set my replies to update faster than tweets.

You can do this based on your requirements but don’t forget to set this.

2. Retweet Format

You can see the retweet format under ‘general’ in settings. The retweet format is by default like the below image.

You need to replace ‘retweeting’ with ‘RT’.

The reason why you should do this is because when you retweet by saying ”retweeting”, more characters are utilized. So change it to RT.

3. Notification with Sound

In twhirl, you have the option of getting notified of new tweets with sound. When you select this, you will be notified for all the tweets. But I feel that I get more distracted when I set this. At the same time, when I’m in some other room, I don’t want to miss my replies.

So what I do is I set sound for only the replies. Check the box which says ‘only play sound on replies/directs’.

4. Do Not Hide When Minimized

Twhirl gives you the option of automatically hiding the client when you minimize. I normally do not prefer this. I don’t want twhirl to hide whenever I minimize. I don’t have the habit of having too many applications running at the same time. So having twhirl running without hiding will not be a problem for me.

Go to settings and select general tab. Here you have to uncheck the box that says ‘hide when minimized’.

5. Lookup Profiles in Browser

Most of the twitter clients have this function where if you click on a user’s profile, it will be loaded in the client itself. I hate this since I cannot get a proper view of the user profile in the client. It shows in a small column. Even if it did show in a big space, I would never prefer to see the profiles in the client.

Go to the general tab under settings and click on the drop down list box which says ‘By default, lookup profiles’. Select ‘in browser’.

After you do all this, don’t forget to save. If you don’t save, the changes won’t have any effect.

Try twhirl for a change and see how it works for you. Let me know in the comments what other settings need to be changed in twhirl when someone has just installed twhirl or started using twhirl.

You can follow me on twitter here.

Challenges are fun isn’t it? In my case, it really was interesting. I took the 7 day pure self-discipline challenge last week (on 3rd June). The challenge ended yesterday and here is the result.

What did I challenge myself to do?

I followed this post written by Glen Allsop in his blog on pure self-discipline and challenged myself the following three things:

1. One blog post everyday in this blog for seven days

2. No twitter

3. Sleep for not more than 6 hours (11PM-5AM)

The Results:

1. One blog post everyday for seven days

This one didn’t come out like I wished. I was supposed to write 7 posts (one everyday). But I ended up writing only 4 posts. But hey, 4 posts in 7 days is better than 1 post a week. It was quite hard to write one post a day since I’m not quite used to it.

This challenge helped me a lot and I’m sure my posting frequency will only get better. Also I’ll be concentrating on quality of blog posts.

2. No twitter

This one was a success. I didn’t post a single tweet for a full week. In fact I hadn’t posted for 2 days when I started the challenge. That makes 9 days of no tweeting. There were 3-4 tweets which were automated from Friendfeed. I disabled the automatic ‘friendfeed to twitter’ posting one day before the challenge ended.

This increased my productivity. I had time to accomplish a lot of things.

3. Sleep for not more than 6 hours (11PM-5AM)

This went on well on all days except Saturday. On Saturday, I slept at 12PM and got up at only 8AM. That’s 8 hours. The rest of the days were pretty good. I didn’t sleep exactly at 11PM or get up exactly at 5AM but somewhat in that range.

This also helped me in becoming more productive. I had time to play football (or soccer if that’s how you call it) every morning with my friends and yet get my work done.

This challenge is surely a success. Now I can stay away from twitter whenever I wish and still be happy. I can get up early in the morning and be productive throughout the day.

Did you take up the challenge? Or will you be taking up the challenge? Please let me know your views in the comments. I’ll be glad to hear what you have got to share.

Image Source: My design for Twitter’s “over capacity” screen by Mykl Roventine

It has been quite long since I have done a links post in this blog. I’m starting it again and from this week, you will see “useful reads” post in this blog every Sunday.

I’ll be sharing some of the useful links I have stumbled upon. If you have any links that you feel to be good, let me know through the contact form and I’ll be glad to add it in the next week’s links post.

So here we go

1. Amazing Blogs: 1-2-3 Plan Every Blogger Should Know

Sonia Simone, in this blog post at Copyblogger, explains how you can stand out from the crowd. There are millions of blogs. Many topics are covered by bloggers everyday. What can you do to make people read your blog instead of million other blogs? This 1-2-3 plan shares some tips for doing it.

2. A Forgotten Key to Blogging Success

This is a post which is targeted to solve the same issue as the first link – building successful blog. Glen Allsop, in this post at Write to done, gives you examples of successful bloggers who have one thing in common for their blogging success – “Being personal”.

3. 5 WordPress.TV Videos worth a Watch

In this post, Janith shares 5 videos from WordPress.TV that bloggers should watch. They are about getting started with Google analytics, blogging in real time, the twitter friendly links plugin, speeding up WordPress with gears for firefox and intense debate plugins which help you to take comments even further.

4. How I Earned $1000+ in Blog Revenue Last Month

Marko Saric’s blog at ‘How to make my blog’ is one of the blogs I recently added to my Google reader. He has written some quality blog posts recently and this post I have shared with you is one of them. It shows you how he earned $1000+ in blog revenue last month. Read and figure out how you can implement it in your blog.

5. 101 Blogging Headlines

This post is from Lyndon Antcliff in his new site called Magnetic Headlines. In this post, he shares 101 killer headlines for blogging which you can modify and use it in your blog. He also shares headline ideas for many other topics in his blog.

Hope you found all the links useful. Let me know if you have written or read a quality article within next Saturday using my contact form so that I can add them on Sunday.

Negative things keep happening to everyone. Do you get frustrated or do you try to find the hiding positive in the negative?

It is so common for people to face negatives. By negatives, I mean those things that you don’t want to happen. Let us focus on the blogging part of our life alone now.

Image: Optimist, PlanTrees by Heart of Oak

Scenario 1 – Broken Blog Theme

You start a blog and in just few days your blog theme doesn’t function properly due to some change you did in the code while editing your blog sidebar. Would you sit down and get angry over your blog? I know people who quit blogging because things don’t go their way.

What should you do?

Instead of getting angry at yourself for editing the sidebar, sit straight for a moment. Clear the fear in your mind. Login to a social networking site (me in twitter) or instant messenger and ask for your friends for help. Do what your (trusted) friend says.

The hidden positive

You know how to solve the issue that you faced. So now you don’t need to be afraid again when editing your blog’s code. Also you will understand how helpful your friends are.

Image: Optimism by baejaar

Scenario 2 – Comment Spam

This happens for almost every blog. It is funny how the spammers get to know about your blog before the search engines even index it. If your blog doesn’t receive comment spam, you can consider yourself lucky or your blog is not worth being in the internet. Okay maybe that is too much. Anyway, don’t get angry with the spam comments.

What you should do?

Install Akismet plugin for WordPress. If you still get many spam comments, especially from a particular IP address, block that IP address.

The hidden positive

See the spam comments this way. The more spam comments you get, more popular your blog is. In mathematical terms:

Comment spam is directly proportional to your blogs popularity.

The next time you receive spam comments, be happy that your blog got one step more popular.

Image: Money by jenn_jenn

Scenario 3 – A Big $0 Income from Your Blog

Blogs will not earn you money (a living) unless you get huge traffic. It won’t earn you even a penny when you are starting unless you are really good at it. I never earned a penny on the first day. Sometimes you won’t earn money after 1, 2 or even 6 months.

What you should do?

This is the tough period in blogging. Once you cross this, you will start earning money (I cannot guarantee a living). Keep your focus on blogging and do it as a hobby. This way it will never bore you when you are waiting for the numbers to appear in your paypal or adsense account.

The hidden positive

You will learn how not to quit when you are facing hard challenges in your life. It will help you keep going even when the target you want to achieve is so far from you.

Almost every negative has a positive. You should only be happy when you are facing a negative.

A negative can teach you a lot more than what a positive can teach you.

So keep going in your life looking for the positives in every negative.

Please share your views in the comments.

I have set myself few challenges which you can see in the post that I wrote yesterday. One of them is to post everyday for 7 days in this blog. Today is second day. I’m right on track in this challenge.

I had a busy day today after coming from college at 4PM finishing the last exam of fourth semester.

My Experience

As I have set myself a challenge to write everyday, I wrote a ‘how to’ post. Now you are probably wondering where the ‘how to’ post is. That’s is where I did a mistake.

I completed writing a post and took a screen shot of what one has to do to make the ‘how to’ trick work. But I didn’t take a screen shot of the result. It took me nearly 30 minutes to write the post and 10 minutes to take screen shot, edit and upload to Flickr.

Just before hitting the publish button, I wanted to verify if the ‘how to’ worked properly. To my surprise, I found it not working. Maybe there was a temporary problem with the site I was going to write about.

So lesson learned

Always check before you post a ‘how to’ post. Check if you get the desired result. Why waste time writing the post only to find that the trick no longer works?

Value your time. Check before you post a ‘how to’.