Niponwave

Wondering if it is sensible to keep a Facebook page. Encouraged by friends like PC, I floated a FB page sometime back to keep a professional face on the social network. Recently though, Facebook brought about a radical change by rolling out the subscriptions feature. This feature essentially makes the FB friending system a lot like Twitter. Clearly FB has copied Google Plus here!

The idea is you can have subscribers right on your profile instead of fans on your page! Interestingly, following the launch of this new feature, Zuckerberg did away with his page and converted all his Page Fans into subsribers of his personal profile! Making me seriously reconsider if having a page is a good idea anymore.

If you don’t want to friend somebody you can simply subscribe to his/her Facebook. Again, if you reject a friend request, the user becomes your subscriber, just like Twitter followers. Consider this: most of us end up rejecting a good many requests every month. You can now keep them as your subscribers if you wish!

Updating a separate page all the time is hard work. It may seem pointless to post the same update twice - on the page and the profile. A page is also less personal. Ensuring the growth and spread of a page is also another challenge whereas profiles grow much faster in a word-of-mouth style. In fact, it is a lot easier to gain subscribers than fans! However, privacy can become a headache. While there is the provision of keeping the more personal updates hidden from subscribers, I may not remember that every time! It only makes sense to allow subscriber comments. This may actually lead to a chaotic situation on my wall!

What do you think? Should I merge the page and profile? Or not?

Propeller head alert: This tip is meant for really savvy users and not teenagers! Also, beware of rants!

Let’s face it. Facebook is cool but over time it gets almost unusable. The number of friends and connections you make on the site soon get overwhelming and you can no more keep a track of what your near and dear ones are upto! All you get is meaningless updates spamming your newsfeed from people in whose life you have little interest. With me so far? Read on!

The point of this post is what you can do to take control of your Facebook life! Let’s first take a quick look at how the enormous mess on Facebook builds up.

1. Lame Games - I effing hate the game stories spamming the newsfeed! *bleargh*
   Honestly I have no interest in your virtual farm life. Please stop posting your game updates and make Facebook a painless experience for all of us!
2. Stupid Apps & Quizzes - Some people can really go crazy with them!
   No I do not want to know who are your top 10 best friends. If play you must, please don’t publish! And if you publish, don’t tag me for chrissake! (Relaxation for very close friends, they can tag me)
3. Uncool Friends - This deeply insightful comic says it all about them - How to Suck at Facebook
   
   Get a friggin’ life!
4. Too many friends - I only add people I know. But let’s face it, I don’t want to follow everyone’s life in detail. I only want to see updates from:
   1. Friends I really care about.
   2. Friends who may not be that close but still post quality updates to make the Facebook stream interesting enough.
5. Pages - Pages are probably the next best thing ever happened on FB after poke. LOL No seriously, pages add much value but all those updates from scores of pages we end up LIKE-ing flood the timeline burying the personal stories deep down :/
   I don’t want to get spammed by your discount offers!

WHAT YOU CAN DO
See I don’t want to be a spoilsport. Thing is, I take Facebook seriously. I try to keep it very personal. I want to use it to interact with friends and connections I really care about. So here’s what I do to keep my Facebook life in control.

Hide Hide Hide
Hide all the crazy games, quizzes and apps. All the uncool friends. Anyone I don’t want to follow. And all the pages, most of them at least.

• I have hidden some 900 apps, about 80 pages and nearly half of my friends from the newsfeed.
• Remember, I get filtered updates i.e. stories from my desired friends by clicking on Top News on the homepage, which is my default setting anyway.
• To see updates from friends I have hidden, I click on Most Recent.

Untag Untag Untag!
When a friend tags me in a photo titled Friends who will go to hell generated by some stupid app, I immediately untag myself because -

1. I want to keep my photostream clean.
2. Every comment that follows on that photo adds to notification spam!

Block ‘em apps
Some apps have this bad habit of posting on friend’s walls! As if spamming the timeline wasn’t enough, they want to spam my wall too. I block them all! >:(

Lists lists lists
So far what I have mentioned pretty much takes care of newsfeed cr*p. But what about keeping unwanted friends from commenting on your wall? Deleting them sounds too simplistic. I take care of that by

1. Creating friend lists
2. making an appropriate use of Facebook privacy settings.

An elaborate discussion on the same is beyond the scope of this treatise. But I promise to write an in-depth guide tackling the issue. Soon, very soon.

I am sure with this article as your reference, you are all set on your quest to Facebook nirvana! Cheers!

Wishing friends on Facebook on their birthdays can sound fun but I have stopped doing that since ages. Here’s why.

It turns out each day someone or other has a birthday which Facebook kindly reminds me of. Wishing each friend on my mile long friend list at the cost of precious time is a pretty lame idea. Okay they are all my friends but thing is, I would have never cared to wish all of them if it wasn’t for the convenience of Facebook. Plainspeak!

There is this friend who checks Facebook several times everyday only to check what is latest on the grapevine, which is cool, and to wish whoever on Facebook has a birthday, which is not cool. If it was me, I’d end up wishing 2-3 people per day! It doesn’t end with wishing, you have to follow it up for comments. Surely there are better things to busy your head with.

Let’s think from the point of view of the birthday boy/girl now. Firstly, wishing birthdays on Facebook walls is such a cliche! It is a total waste of wall space too. :-/ The more interesting stories get buried 2-3 days deep. Then there is the mammoth task of replying to each wisher! *yawns*

Think you have an acute cricket sense? For cricket-philes like you down with cricket fever this world cup season, the new Facebook game Cricket Pundit - designed by my friends Mitanshu Garg and Divyatman Khare - is just what the doctor ordered. Cricket Pundit is basically a virtual game that lets you bet on upcoming matches and win attractive prizes!

Cricket Pundit

There are several pre-decided bet conditions for a match and you can spend points as virtual cash against your bets. Each user is given 10000 points to get going with. A typical example of a bet: How many wickets will Netherlands take against England? with options as <3, 3-5, 5-7 and >7.

The game has caught on with the World Cup fever and has been a quite hit already with 379 registered users in the first 5 days since it was released on the night of 15th Feb. 229 bets were placed for the warm-up match between India and New Zealand and 440 bets for the first ODI India vs Bangladesh.

The prizes are sponsored by Scopial. First prize for bests placed on India vs Bangladesh match was a Scopial tee shirt while 2nd to 16th rank winners got a 15% discount coupon each. List of prize winners are published after every match on the Cricket Pundit Wall.

Mitanshu had earlier come up with a virtual stock exchange game that allowed you to trade shares using points (virtual cash) during his IIT Roorkee days. He was also part of the team that helped the IIM - Ahmedabad come up with Cricstock.com during the 2007 World Cup (TOI article).

I have already suffered heavy losses as my insight into cricket ain’t that great you know But if you are a die hard fan of the sport this is one social game you should definitely take a dekko at!

In this tutorial I will tell you what code I have used to remove admin menus from the WordPress backend of a site with multiple users having near-admin rights. There I used a theme written by me almost from scratch and of course I din’t want anyone else to mess up my work by tinkering with the settings! More than that, I din’t want to confuse them with admin menus that they have no idea about. To achieve this keep-the-dashboard-simple mission I decided to do away with the entire set of Dashboard, Links, Appearance, Tools, Settings and Plugins menus. By a set I mean the menu and its submenus as well, obviously.

Without further ado, here’s the PHP:


function remove_menus () {
global $menu;
$restricted = array(__('Dashboard'), __('Links'), __('Appearance'), __('Tools'), __('Settings'), __('Plugins'));
end ($menu);
while (prev($menu)){
$value = explode(' ',$menu[key($menu)][0]);
if(in_array($value[0] != NULL?$value[0]:"" ,$restricted)){unset($menu[key($menu)]);}
}
}
add_action('admin_menu', 'remove_menus');


As you can see, I have entered the menus I want to discard under the $restricted array. I borrowed this code from the Hungred Dot Com and here’s is the link to the original article, which not only explains in detail the mechanism of action of the code but also tells you how you can gain even greater control on your admin menus to fine tune them to your requirements:

Remove WordPress Admin Menu Without Affecting WordPress Core System (Hungred Dot Com)

Remember the above code mentioned doesn’t remove actual admin pages, users can still visit the pages if they know the URL! That pretty much addresses my requirement but if you need to prevent access completely, refer to the relevant code given in the original guide I linked to.

Health Care-Associated Infections (HAIs) affect > 2 million patients and contributes to 88,000 deaths annually in the US. The estimated yearly financial impact is at least $4.5 billion. Efforts to lower infection risks include raising awareness of HAI among hospital staff and ensuring adherence to guidelines for prevention and control. For example, hand hygiene among the health care workers alone can go a long way in bringing down HAIs. Kimberly-Clark, a global leader in health care products, has launched a unique campaign to educate health care workers on HAI prevention called “Not on My Watch”. I was contacted by Barbara Dunn from Kimberly-Clark to share this on my blog. Here’s the link to the website of their campaign, a great source of tools and information to help eliminate HAI.

HAI: ‘Not on My Watch’

Hospital-acquired infections or nosocomial infections are those which were neither present nor incubating at the time of admission.

The nosocomial pathogens have reservoirs and sources in inanimate environment like contaminated tap water as also the animate environment e.g. infected or carrier health care workers, patients and hospital visitors. Sometimes, contaminated supplies can be a common source of spread.

These pathogens can get transmitted through cross-infection usually i.e. from one patient to another spreading most often on the inadequately cleaned hands of health workers. Autoinoculation is another important route where the patient’s own flora is transmitted by invasive devices e.g. aspiration of oropharyngeal flora into the lung along an endotracheal tube. Infection also spreads via airborne droplets released by sneezing and coughing.

The growing number of immunosuppressed patients, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, fungal and viral superinfections, and invasive devices and procedures have only made the HAI situation worse. A quick look at some major nosocomial infections:

• Urinary Tract Infections Pathogens spread via catheter, or from the patient’s perineum or gastrointestinal tract especially in women.
• Pneumonia Nosocomial pneumonias occur following aspiration of endogenous or hospital-acquired oropharyngeal flora, of which the most fatal is ventilator-associated pneumonia.
• Surgical Wound Infections Age, underlying diseases (e.g. diabetes mellitus, obesity), surgeon’s technical skill, and inappropriate timing of prophylactic antibiotics are all responsible.
• Infections Related to Vascular Access and Monitoring Intravascular devices are common causes of local site infection, most importantly central vascular catheter (CVCs).

To understand what the “Not on My Watch” campaign is all about, let’s watch this short video.

I went deep into the intriguing discussion if leaving Facebook is a good idea after all at this link - http://www.bongbuzz.net/?p=2316