I’ve become a fan of Ping.fm and its mass notification abilities.  However, I wanted to update my Ping.fm status without navigating away from the page I was on.  So I created the Ping.fm Mobile Sidebar for Firefox.

Much like my many other Firefox sidebars, it simply works as a shortcut to access the mobile version of a site.  This time it’s Ping.fm.

Yes, you could easily do this with a bookmark in Firefox, but I prefer to have an icon in my toolbar and a keyboard shortcut at my disposal.

Have you heard about Twitterkeys?  It’s a site that puts together a list of special characters that you can just copy and paste and put into a Twitter post.

Where as they are marketing to Twitter, these symbols work great for Plurk, ReJaw, Facebook, email or whatever you want to use them with.

Twitterkeys offers lots of different symbols from hearts to stars and even a snowman.  I think there are about 200 symbols to choose from.

Check them out as it may come in handy.

As I’ve been socializing on Plurk, there is one topic that just seems to grab a lot of attention.  And that topic is bacon.  Everywhere I turn, there are more and more bacon lovers sharing their interesting bacon finds.

I thought I’d put a few of those together to share with all the bacon lovers out there.

OMG Bacon

Bacon Dispenser

Bacon Vodka

Wake n’ Bacon Alarm Clock & Cooker

Bacon Ice Cream

Chocolate Covered Bacon

Bacon and Cake

Canned Bacon

A few days ago Plurk came out with the ability to customize your profile with your own CSS code.  I put my skills to work and created my first Plurk theme!

It’s a bit darker, to match my website, and comes with rounded boxes, a unified timeline and colors that pop.

You can get a better feel for it by viewing my Plurk Profile.

Want the theme?  No problem.

Install TwisterMc’s Plurk Theme

Want to edit the code?  Go ahead.  Just remember to give me a little credit for the time I spent creating the theme.  You can grab the code by installing it and then editing your Plurk profile and customizing it.

Plurk fans, here is the Plurk team for your desktop!

We are the ones that go Plurk in the night.

Download the Desktop - 1440×900

Additionally, if you’d rather have a more colorful one, check out the Plurk and Friends desktop.

The Plurk, SocialThing and Facebook Firefox sidebar extensions got a minor update today.  I just bumped the max version to work the the latest security release of Firefox 3.

Are there any other site’s you’d like to see load in Firefox’s sidebar?

I’m a big fan of Plurk, a micro blogging platform, that is often compared to Twitter.  It has basically taken me away from Twitter by fixing some of my big Twitter concerns.  The more I use Plurk, the more I realize how many limitations and issues Twitter currently has.

Here are a few reasons why I like Plurk better than Twitter:

1. Inline Replies - Keeping conversations together.  This really makes it feel like a community of users and not just a string posts.  In Twitter, when someone replied to a Tweet I put up yesterday, it was hard to follow the conversation.  Plurk however, keeps everything together.

After my recent success with Plurkit, I decided to take the idea to the next level and add in more social sites.  The outcome is SocialAddict which has 11 social sites within one Adobe Air application.

What SocialAddict does is loads the mobile or iPhone version of each site for easy access.  Again, I didn’t tie into any APIs or do massive re-construction.  These are all previously available applications that have been tied together to make it quick and easy to go from one to the next.

Within SocialAddict you’ll find:

• BrightKite
• Facebook
• FriendFeed To Go

I’ve been playing around with Aptana and Adobe Air to see if I could create a basic application.  What I created was Plurkit; an Adobe Air version of Plurk mobile.

Ok, I’ll be the first to admit, this is not as good as something like Twhirl. However, it is my first attempt at anything in Adobe Air so I’m pretty happy.

I didn’t use the Plurk API and do a lot of crazy coding.  All I did was take the mobile version of Plurk and embed it into an Adobe Air application.  And voila; Plurkit!

Ever want to search Plurk.com for topics or friends?  Well there isn’t a formal search yet, however you can search with Plurk Lurker, a customized Google search just for Plurk.com.

Plurk Lurker makes it quick and simple to find information on Plurk.  It is limited to what Google can see, but it’s better than nothing.  You can find posts or users as long as their information is public.

Granted, it’s pretty basic but it’s better than none; which is what I’ve found otherwise.  I’m sure as soon as an API opens up, someone will create a better Plurk search.