Warning – this post is pretty technical…

For a while, I’ve been an experimenter of different social tools. Like many in our industry, I’ve bookmarked interesting articles read in a delicious account, I’ve tweeted occasionally, and I’ve got an RSS reader. But it all felt increasingly manual. I’ve recently decided to try to rationalise what I’m doing, to avoid logins, keeping naming conventions in my head, and remembering which system I’m using at the moment.

I use Firefox, mainly because I can drag favourites into a toolbar, and I like having the different coloured buttons (favicons) up there. It looks very pretty and easy to check the sites I use all the time. I’d pretty stopped using twitter to post, slightly daunted by how many spam followers I now have and also by the esteemed people I am following appearing to be more interesting than me.

To find articles I like to read, I have recently switched from Bloglines to Google Reader, because I thought the Bloglines interface was a bit ugly. If you want to see what I subscribe to, the list (blogroll) from Bloglines is here. (I’d show you the Google one, but they haven’t got around to sharing that yet.)

With so many sources, I found I needed a quicker way to skim through them, and tag the interesting ones on my delicious account:

I found a system called greasemonkey – which in the word of Wikipedia is “a Mozilla Firefox add-on that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to most HTML-based web pages (also known as augmented browsing). As Greasemonkey scripts are persistent, the changes made to the web pages are executed every time the page is opened, making them effectively permanent for the user running the script.”

So you add programming capability to your browser when you look at specific websites. I then found a piece of greasemonkey script that allowed my to customise my google reader – allowing me to change the buttons beneath each article, and tag them directly to delicious.

Having done that, I wanted to send specifically-tagged delicious bookmarks to my Twitter account – to share a few articles that might be of interest to the digital marketing people that I am mostly linked to.

I found twitterfeed, which makes use of an RSS capability in delicious – when I tag an article, in adding a specific tag, the article can be picked up by twitterfeed and posted into twitter. Even better, by compressing the article link through a site called cli.gs, I can see how many humans have clicked on the link, and satisfy vain curiosity while risking dejection as the lack of shared interest.

And lastly, for the rare occasions when I find an article that may be of interest to my Facebook friends, I can append a specific hashtag (#fb) to my tweets, and it will appear in my status update, with this app.

If you are still with me by this point, what I have done is connect all sorts of social tools to simplify my life, using a practically no technical knowledge, but an understanding of what should be possible in today’s digital, open-API world. It’s a problem I didn’t know I had until about two weeks ago, and one I doubt many people will ever lose sleep over. But with lots of different networks, systems, and practical uses of the internet, this sort of DIY tinkering is going to become increasingly necessary. And I am filled with the same sort of glee that some people get from fine-tuning a car engine or putting up some shelves.

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