#twitterjail

I'm a sometimes moderator in the church social media (#chsocm) tweetchat that happens each Tuesday at 9pm over on Twitter.

Last Tuesday, one of our esteemed moderators (@azrork) finished up the chat from Twitter Jail.  What is Twitter Jail?  It's when Twitter cuts you off, and you're not allowed to tweet for a period of time.

Twitter has limits on various account activities.  These include:

• number of tweets an account is allowed to send per day (1000)
• number of daily direct messages (250)
• how many accounts that can be followed in one day (1000)
• number of tweets (including retweets) that are allowed in "semi-hourly intervals" (the exact number is not officially stated by Twitter, but rumored to be around 100 per hour)

For most of us, this doesn't pose a problem.  I would have a difficult time sending 1000 tweets in a day, and I can assure you that most of my followers (including my children) would unfollow me if I did. 

But, if you're moderating a tweetchat, responding to tweets, and retweeting the conversation, you can easily hit the 100 tweets per hour ceiling, and when that happens, you'll get a message something like this:

Sigh.

And you might feel something like this:

But, never fear. Twitter Jail only lasts for 30 minutes up to several hours.

What to do if you're put into Twitter Jail?  Do what our brilliant #chsocm moderator did: plan ahead and have a separate twitter account from which to tweet when you're in jail. Or switch to another platform if you still have more to say (Facebook, Tumblr, etc.). Or just use your virtual imprisonment as a suggestion to step away from your device and go fold a load of laundry or something.

Either way, you'll be back to the tweet life soon.

Starting a blog. Again.

I thought it was about time to get back to blogging, so I...

Look! A squirrel!

Squirrels are cute, considering they are essentially rats with bushy tails, but those excessively friendly ones make me uneasy. The one in this picture was stalking us on a family picnic on Roanoke Island, NC a couple of years ago. It was far closer than a "wild" animal should be, and those beady eyes were chilling. Can't you feel the fear, just looking at it?  Maybe you had to be there.

I once read an interesting factoid about squirrels: when their nests get too messy, they simply leave them behind and build new ones. As the mother of three teenagers, that frankly makes a lot of sense to me.

Back to blogging. 

I had a little-used Wordpress blog called finewithme, on which I posted 11 times in 8 months a couple of years ago.  I enjoyed the writing I did on that blog, but it was largely ignored (by me and others).  I was never quite sure what I hoped to do there, and I couldn't figure out how to transition it into some of the circles on the Venn diagram of me.

So, like the squirrel with the messy nest, I'm leaving that blog to build another. Maybe I'll visit from time to time, maybe not. I expect that I will write here about things related to my life as an educator, an Episcopalian, a social media fan, a wife and a mom, and more.

Obviously we'll be singing. And of course we'll have some laughs along the way.

Thanks for coming along.