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Do you remember the utterly pointless article about how to annoy your friends on Facebook?  Well, utterly pointless if you don’t like to be annoying sometimes.  Believe it or not, Facebook is not the only place you can be annoying online.  If you really truly enjoy getting on people’s nerves, why not attempt it on Twitter also?

In this article I would like to show you that it is truly easy to annoy people on Twitter.  In fact, it is so easy that some of these ideas are regularly practiced on Twitter already, and probably by accident.

Take this as a warning, if you are already doing one of these and didn’t know it was annoying, well, now you know.

Tweet In All Caps, All The Time

If you’ve been near a computer for a while, you will know that using all caps is yelling.  Want know how to annoy people in real life?  Walk around yelling everything.  Want to annoy someone on Twitter?  Do the same thing. Unless you are Billy Mayes, you can’t pull it off without being annoying.

Maybe you’ll get attention, but not in a good way.  Go hurt someone else’s digital ears.

Tweet Something Spammy Over & Over Again

OK, I know that once you begin to repeat something over and over it becomes spam in itself.  However, doing it with a statement that is spammy already is what will make it that much more annoying.  It could be an affiliate link, a link to a contest, a promotion to your favorite blog post, or just something mundane.  Repeating it over and over will definitely get you on the “annoying wagon.”

As a personal note, if someone I am following starts doing this, I will more than likely drop them like a ton of dead bricks.  Take that as a warning.

Tweet Updates About Every Mundane Thing That Happens Throughout The Day

Chances are you are not cool enough for everyone to care how much milk you put in your corn flakes this morning.  They probably won’t care what brand of toothpaste you chose this time and whether or not it tastes good.  Seriously, get out of bed, put your stupid socks on, eat your cereal, and brush your teeth and KEEP IT TO YOURSELF.  Sorry, bud, but nobody cares.

Don’t Reply To Anyone Who Speaks To You On Twitter

The silent treatment is not meant for Twitter.  Have you ever heard of something called conversation?  Isn’t that one of the points, maybe even the goal of having a Twitter account?  To communicate?  If all you are on Twitter is to speak and not listen, good luck keeping followers.  I know we have covered this already, but most people are there to communicate.  @ Replies are not all that difficult to figure out.

This is even more annoying when a company on Twitter does this.  Why have a Twitter account to interact with your customers if you are going to forget they even have a voice?  Trust me, they do, and they’ll use it even if you’re not listening.

Use Multiple Twitter Accounts To Tweet The Same Tweets All The Time

I know some people (@BrettBarner who also runs @godlysheep) that I believe know how to run multiple Twitter accounts without being annoying.  However, if you are just using multiple accounts hoping that different people will follow each and that it will equal more followers, you’re annoyingly mistaken.  Run a personal one and one for your business or blog but do it right and keep things separate.  Does that mean you shouldn’t tweet the occasional cross-tweet?  No, but don’t go overboard.

Twitter can be a great tool for communication, if used correctly.  It can also be a great tool to use to annoy the followers you love the most, if used incorrectly.

Take a gander at MakeUseOf’s Twitter guide in order to get a handle on things.  I hope it helps.

What else can people do on Twitter to be annoying?  Share in the comments.

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When it comes to PDF, Mac users have everything they need built in, supported natively by the OS. Creating a PDF is as easy as printing a document, while reading and modifying one can be done from Preview. Most users probably never bother to look for alternatives, and therefore might miss out on one good alternative free PDF reader called Skim.

This is a PDF reader and note-taker for OS X which was originally designed to help users read and annotate scientific papers in PDF. But it is also great for viewing any PDF document.

Focus On Readers

The first thing that I noticed from Skim was the unique features of the table of contents pane on the left. Chapters that I have read are marked differently to unread chapters. And if you hover your mouse above a specific part of the document, Skim will show a quick glance of the content. I think this is a very useful feature for doing quick skimming.

This table of contents pane also allows you to do a quick search on a specific word or phrase from the document. This feature will be very handy if you are dealing with a very thick text book with thousands of pages. You can choose to see the results by words or by relevance.

If you want to focus on your reading and free yourself from distraction, go to “View – Presentation (or Fullscreen)” menu.

Skim will show only the document with other things blocked out.

If you combine the feature with “Tools – Rotate” menu

Along with “PDF Display – Single Page” and “Zoom To Fit” under the “PDF” menu,

You could turn your MacBook into a nice eBook reader -athough holding a laptop sideways is a little bit uncomfortable.

Focus On Learners

Skim lets users create notes easily within the PDF document. So if you find something useful in the book or you want to be reminded about things that you need to do regarding the text that you read, just add some notes directly on the page.

There is another kind of note called “Anchored Note“. This type is used for longer notes. You can assign a title and icon to it. It resides on a page as a small icon and will pop up if you double click on it.

To further the ability to annotate documents, Skim also allows users to draw circles, rectangles, and lines; and also to highlight the text.

Another tool that can help users in their learning is taking snapshots. You can take “snapshots” of important sections of a PDF document, to keep them on your screen for easy reference. This way you don’t have to leaf back to the section every time you want to see it.

All of these annotations and snapshots could be found quickly by using Notes Pane. You can show/hide the pane via “View – Show/Hide Notes Pane“.

If you need to remove one (or more) of the notes, you can do so by right clicking on the item(s) within this pane and choose “Delete“. It’s possible to use other basic editing commands here such as Copy, Edit and Select. Choosing “Show” will bring you the notes from wherever you are in the document.

These are only a few basic features of Skim that I was able to explore during my short encounter with it, but it covers what ordinary users need. Power users might want to dig deeper to more advanced features such as AppleScript support; Interaction with LaTeX, SyncTeX, and PDFSync; and Integration with BibDesk and other third party applications. Refer to the Help menu for more help.

What do you think of Skim? Have you tried it? Do you know any other good free PDF readers that we might have missed? Please share them using the comments below.

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WordPress is a powerful content management system, and its popularity as a portfolio solution is enticing to many. There are a lot of themes out there that claim to do the job, but if you’re as picky as me you’ll find some pretty annoying flaws in many of them.

In my search for the best of the bunch, I installed about 30 offerings (out of the hundreds I looked at) and after trying them out and changing my mind a couple of times I finally settled down with a theme. This took me months, so I’m going to save you the bother and present the five free WordPress themes that made my own particular shortlist.

SimpleFolio – The Best All-Rounder

Despite being a tricky free WordPress theme to set-up, SimpleFolio by Omar Corrales is worth the hassle. For your troubles you’ll get a clean and easy-to-navigate theme with a separate portfolio section (with the option to exclude portfolio posts from your blog) and a home screen to die for.

The home screen includes a JavaScript front-page slider to exhibit portfolio entries, which does a great job of making your work look awesome with its smooth transitions. There are a further three widgetized areas on the home page, so adding a contact form or Twitter plug-in is as easy as pie.

If you like the look of this theme and fancy giving it a go, then you’re going to need a little help. There’s a fantastic little guide over at WordPress Handyman which guides you through the ins and outs of setting up and maintaining your new portfolio. As always with WordPress, you can edit the style.css file to suit your personal tastes.

Vikiworks Infinity – For Social Media Types

For an aesthetically pleasing, majorly customizable portfolio that’s plugged in to Flickr, Twitter and Delicious, look no further than Infinity by Vikiworks. The free WordPress theme follows a three-fixed column style, and whilst not being widget ready could probably be modified with some serious Notepad’ing.

There are two PSD files to download as well as the theme, which makes customization in Photoshop that little bit easier. Blog posts themselves are presented in two thumbnail cover-style columns to the left of the page, so if you’re not bothered about separating your work and your blog then this one’s for you.

For the more courageous there’s a sister theme called Mashup based on Infinity, only with widgets and a style switcher. The developer has appealed for help in completing it, and needs guinea pigs willing to give it a go. If you’re not averse to beta testing, you can download Mashup here.

FolioGrid – For Speed-Freaks, Designers, Photographers & Artists

This sharp looking offering from FrogsThemes has a little something for everyone. Utilising the tried-and-tested grid layout, the theme comes in a variety of colours and is easily altered with some handy CSS. All the styling is done through the theme’s stylesheet, meaning you really can open up and customize this one.

The menu lives at the top of the page, and is always accessible from anywhere on the site, making it a cinch to navigate. There’s some lovely use of jQuery for slick transitions, and the theme is widget-ready. For a fast and lightweight WordPress portfolio, FolioGrid does the job.

Fullscreen – For Style-Conscious Photographers & Videographers

If photos are the order of the day then you may want to pay close attention. Fullscreen is a portfolio package developed by Graph Paper Press that delivers nothing but a menu and blog posts (represented by just images). It all makes for a very sexy looking clean interface, with some fancy JavaScript image rollover effects for added garnish.

One thing to look out for is some issues with the menu not displaying correctly in older versions of Internet Explorer, though some of you won’t really care (and those that do can customize, of course).

Images can be implemented into posts using the WordPress media gallery, which makes for easy posting. If you want your photo or video work to be the main focus of your site, then this theme will honour your wishes.

Contrast – The Black Sheep

SmashingMagazine once hosted a typographic layout competition for WordPress and Tumblr themes, and Paul Linder’s Contrast didn’t win. But that doesn’t matter, because it’s awesome all the same.

Using nothing but XHTML and CSS, it’s lightning quick and beautiful to look at. Presenting you with a straight-up black and white home screen, Contrast is designed to be left as a portfolio rather than a blog as well.

As the focus is on text, many writers, copy-editors or web designers may find this appealing, though the minimalist design could suit anyone. It’s bold, unique and quick.

Have you used any of these free WordPress themes? Got another favourite we’ve not featured here? Spread the word in the comments! Are you a photographer? Check out our very own photography PDF manual by Bakari — The Essential Guide To Digital Photography.

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Flash galleries allow you to show off a little with your work, and why not? Functional loading bars, crisp animations and a clean interface means Flash ticks a lot of boxes for many looking to exhibit their work on the web.

If you’re searching for a lightning fast public Flash gallery generator with all the above, then SimpleViewer is all you need. It’s free, and works with a myriad of imaging applications including Photoshop, Picasa and iPhoto.

If you’ve not got any of the above (or would rather use a lightweight solution), fear not for there is a dedicated GUI for SimpleViewer called Porta. This software will allow you to input the parameters you desire to customize your gallery without the need for trawling through an XML file and fiddling with code.

For the benefit of this demonstration, I will be using Porta. If like me you’ve got hundreds of ready-to-go processed images, then this is a speedy solution that “just works”. You can download the Windows version here, and Linux (and possibly Mac) users who are interested will be pleased to know that the generator will work with the aid of Wine. You won’t need to download SimpleViewer seperately if you are using Porta, all you need to get started is included.

SimpleViewer works by creating a folder containing your images, thumbnails, script files and an index page. When you visit this URL within a web browser (e.g. mydomain.com/holiday2010/) the gallery will be loaded in its entirety, making SimpleViewer ideal for quick sharing solutions.

Creating A Public Flash Gallery With Porta

Once you’ve downloaded and installed Porta, locate it in the Start Menu and open it up. You should be prompted straight away to select a folder to use for your gallery. The images within this folder will be added automatically to the list of images in your gallery, though you can re-arrange and remove images later if you wish.

Select a folder in the dialog box that appears, you may want to take some time collating your images first. Once you’ve chosen your desired images, Porta will return you to its default state and provide a couple of options to fiddle with.

First of all name your gallery and customise the footer if you want.

Change the destination of your eventual Flash masterpiece by clicking change and specifying a location (it will default to a folder called album in the location you previously chose). The Edit Album… button allows you to decide on the order of your images, as well as captions and micro-captions.

Drag and drop your images in the left pane to rearrange, and clicking each one will give you the option to add captions. The gallery generator also allows you to pull EXIF data as captions with the Extract Captions button.

Once you’re done arranging, click Close to be taken back to Porta’s default menu and click Options. Here you can tweak your gallery so that it appears exactly as you want it.

Ensure that Use SimpleViewer as primary album viewer is checked, else you’ll generate a basic HTML gallery instead of the fancy Flash one you desire. The rest of the settings are entirely subjective based on your requirements from the gallery, and image size and quality will depend on bandwidth and space limitations.

Before hitting OK click on Options next to the SimpleViewer check box, and choose your colour scheme and appearance options.

Once you’re set, hit OK to return to the main menu and then Start to generate your gallery. SimpleViewer won’t hang around long, and your gallery will soon be generated. Hit Show Gallery to check out your creation, not forgetting to gasp in awe at the sexy interface in front of you.

You can now upload the folder directly to your webspace, or pick apart the HTML and integrate into a webpage of your choosing.

Using SimpleViewer With Other Applications

The full list of compatible SimpleViewer applications extends way beyond Photoshop, Picasa and iPhoto. Adobe Lightroom 2.0 and Apple Aperture are supported as well as RapidWeaver for the Mac and SimpleViewerExport on Linux.

Each application package contains the relevant scripts to generate galleries, though some require manual tweaking of the galleries.xml file to set parameters such as thumbnail size and scaling options.

There is a full list of compatible programs on the SimpleViewer website, as well as download links to scripts and detailed instructions on how to use each one in conjunction with your existing software.

Conclusion

For a lightning quick solution to putting your favourite shots on the web using Flash, SimpleViewer leads the class. If you’re after professional results, and don’t fancy going down the JavaScript route then give it a whirl. Porta’s all you need for a test-drive, and it won’t cost you a penny.

Have you tried SimpleViewer? Do you prefer it to JavaScript-based solutions? Let us know in the comments.

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