In what can only be described as a uniquely 21st century problem, I've been spending a fair amount of time puzzling out the best way to set up a notification system for the birth of Blueberry. While, making phone calls is fine in an old fashioned, quaint kind of way, it's not very efficient.
The impetus for setting up this domain name and its various incarnations (beginning with our wedding), was to bridge the communication gap that comes from having family and friends all over the world. Right now there are family/friends reading this in the US, Mexico, Colombia, England, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland - those are the ones I'm sure of, but I have no doubt there are more. Phone calls and email are slow, delayed, time consuming, and repetitive (I doubt anyone is 'excited' the dozenth time they say, he's born! - maybe not, but I'd rather be holding my kid then talking to everyone on the phone!).
I know, back in the day, that's the way it was and we were happy!
But, it isn't that day, and we don't have to be happy doing it that way. There are solutions that are faster, more efficient at distributing the information and easier to use. So that is what we're going to do.
This blog provides us with a fantastic means of keeping all of you, the most important people we know, abreast of what's going on with our growing, soon-to-be, bouncing baby boy. But it's up to you to check up on us, read the RSS feed or (GASP!) actually visit the site.
I've got a better way - if you want more information as it happens. We're going to leverage this blog, SMS and Twitter.
(As an aside, I just had a vision of me, 40 years from now, reviewing archived posts from this blog with my son, and trying to explain to him how this was all state-of-the-art before he was born. And him laughing at my quaint history lesson - 'Oh dad, you and your Twitter talk! And what the hell! Blueberry?')
So here's the deal. If you desire more notification of posts from this blog, and periodic updates as things happen like 'Oh! The baby kicked - we saw it!' or the mundane 'Shuffling through Babys-r-us as we register for this kid. Still looking for the home theater receivers' or the celebratory 'he's here!' - delivered to your phone, this is how it can happen.
First, ensure that receiving SMS (texting) is not a problem for your phone and you won't get dinged if you get too many messages. I can't guarantee how many messages we'll be sending out, but wireless carriers are a bit predatory about this stuff, so make sure you have enough. Seriously. Don't come to us with a $2000 text messaging bill because we got a little bit crazy about how cute the socks were. Seriously. Check your plan before you do this.
Register with Twitter. Now, before you say anything, hold on. One. You don't have to actually post anything on the twitter (as I like to call it). Two. You're not required to make your twitter feed public - you can protect it and only people you allow in can see your feed if you actually post anything. And three. You can in fact, register, get your username, setup your phone to receive messages, and follow us and never do anything with it again. (There's a lot of really good stuff and information you can find with Twitter - check it out. Just make sure you don't send everything to your phone!)
Once you register for Twitter, configure your settings: protect your tweets if you want (if you don't plan on actually tweeting, protect it anyway), setup your mobile phone and verify it to Twitter so you can receive text messages and activate updates, and finally, do any other settings activity you want - upload a picture, design your home page - whatever.
Now, while your logged in to Twitter, visit this link http://twitter.com/dinaandphilip. Click the follow button underneath our image and then to really make this thing work, click on 'Device updates off'. In the resulting yellow box that opens up, turn on device updates. Assuming you've set up your phone settings correctly, this means every time there's an update on our twitter feed, you'll get a text of it. And, since I've set up the blog to notify twitter of new posts, you'll find out about that too. Near instantaneously. I hear flying cars are right around the corner. Really. It'll be like the Jetsons.
(Should you desire that getting information about the kid from this blog, its twitter feed, or from Philip's facebook (slightly delayed), you can thoroughly saturate yourself our news by adding Philip's twitter feed at http://twitter.com/oski or Dina's feed (if she ever uses it) at http://twitter.com/oskiette)
Remember, you're under no obligation to go through all this. But, if you're interested it joining the never-wait-for-news-and-information-generation and want to know what's up with this kid and his parents, dive in!
I'll be troubleshooting the setup for a bit still - working out all the kinks - but the whole system (the blog, feeding the twitter and back) should be solid very soon. You may see a few stray tweets that don't mean anything.
Questions? Email me at philip@dinaandphilip.com, direct message via twitter @oski, text me, hit me up on IM, send me a Facebook email, or give me an old fashioned phone call (if I don't answer I'm checking on the flying cars).