peaceengine.com Blog

Saturday, January 24, 2009 — by Lyno Sullivan

112B Caught Up with Digg Shouts

My digg.com shout queue is empty right now, not by turning off shouting but, to the contrary, by keeping up with my friends’ shouts, to the best of my ability, which has become my personal policy. Please have a look below at the screen snap of my digg.com shout_queue. Notice that my end_of_queue marker is 6 days old. That means I shouted that queue marker to myself last Friday and have kept up with all my incoming shouts ever since.

[112B_11_I_am_caught_up_with_shouts]

. . . Catching Up on Stale Shouts . . .

Keeping up with my shout queue is my highest priority Digg activity during the time interval that I am on-line. When I first come on-line after a couple days absence I select the last page (the tail end) of my shout queue and delete every shout except for any shout of one of my submissions, an occasional interesting stale shout, and the last hour or two of shouts.

Recent shouts indicate friend who are probably on-line now. It would be nice if digg.com provided a decent shout_queue manager that would cleanup my queue to my personal preference. Alas, they choose not to do so leaving me to my repetitive finger, wrist, elbow, and shoulder motions.

Once I have brought my end_of_queue marker back to the page 1 (the head end) of my shout queue, I am ready to proceed with my day’s activity.

[end_of_queue marker]

************************************************
Hold on there bucky boy.
You have reached the shouts at the end of the universe
************************************************

. . . A Mouse and Keyboard Trick . . .

I have discovered that deleting the queue is best done from the top of page downward. This is done by positioning the mouse over the first “Delete” tag and clicking the mouse. That click deletes the queue item (in this case a shout) and scrolls the list upwards, thereby positioning the next queue item under the cursor.

All this would be well and good except there is an intervening confirmation window which must be OKed. The natural first instinct is to move the mouse to the “OK” and click. But hold on there. Let your body drop down into slow-motion mode and observe every action slowly. Think about alternatives.

You don’t need to use the mouse to “OK” the delete. Pressing “enter” does the same thing. The proper sequence is mouse “click” followed by keyboard “enter”.

“click,enter”
“click,enter”
“click,enter”

. . . Tabbed “digg it” Activity . . .

Those fortunate enough to be using a tabbed browser like Firefox can take advantage of another mouse and keyboard trick. After queuing up a set of tabs for digg marking, set the mouse and ctrl-f4 to close the current tab. Doing this leaves the mouse positioned to the same position as the previous screen.

“click,ctrl-f4”
“click,ctrl-f4”
“click,ctrl-f4”

Having completed this activity for current friends shouts, it is time to begin. The “Recent Activity” tab shows the results of the minimalist “click,ctrl-f4” activity just completed (see below). All is well in digg.com’s “Your Incoming Shouts” and my friends can see for themselves that I am caught up with my shouts and whether I dugg their shouts.

[112B_12_recent_activity_shows]

Unless I am pulled away unexpectedly, I like to end each digg day by leaving me Favorites and Recent_Activity tabs looking good. Anyone can know where I am at any given moment by viewing my homepage http://digg.com/users/lynosull at digg.com and my most recent blog page at http://blog.peaceengine.com/ because those are the two places I operate consistently.

[112B_13_after_digg_shout]

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