Preparation for MACUL

As you know, the annual meeting is just a few days away. I was starting to get ready yesterday and I thought I would share my geeky preparation with you. The first thing I did was dust off my Twitter client. I don’t really use Twitter as much as I should. I mainly use it when I’m at conferences to see what’s going on in the back channel.

I use Tweetdeck to check Twitter. The first thing I had to do was clear out the search columns I’d created for the last conference I attended. Then I set up my MACUL search column. #MACUL10 is the tag of choice. Now as geekery goes that’s pretty pedantic. The real geekery came when I found a way to get the MACUL search feed to show up on my desktop.

I saw this over at Mac OS X Tips. They used this technique to have the feed fromFaceBook show up on their desktop. I only had to modify the process a little to get the #MACUL10 Twitter search to show up. It relies on the instillation of a new preference pane called GeekTools.

I just followed their full instructions and then used TextEdit to modify the files they already created to replace their FaceBook feed and files with my MACUL ones. The whole process really shows some of the power in OS X. It relies on Automator actions and Shell access. Luckily someone else has already did all the heavy lifting for me. If you have any questions about the process I might be able to answer them. No promises though, I barely understood what I was doing.

Anyway, that’s my first step in getting ready for he conference. Now I need to go over to the online planner and figure out what I’m going to see.

Crossposted from macul.edublogs.org