This actually works… even when Twitter doesn’t.
51 days ago
In the last week Twitter has reminded me how dull my life is. I’ve been sitting at my desk, doing the usual stuff and in the back of my mind is the nagging awareness that I haven’t updated Twitter all day. I try to think of witty and/or profound tidbits from my life, but come up dry. Twitting, “Sitting at the keyboard doing the usual stuff,” five or six times a day seems rather pointless.
So, blatantly stealing Paul Ford’s idea, I’ve decided to just make up stuff.
374 days ago
A friend and I were fiddling around with Twitter and I decided to put my Twits in a sidebar. Twitter provides a few ‘badges’ for this but, like any good geek, I wanted a little more control.
Fortunately, Twitter also provides a RSS feed.
Textpattern Plugins to the rescue. The RSS parsing was trivial — Bit Santos’ bit_rss is dead simple to install and configure. While not as fully featured as a hand-rolled Magpie RSS feed parser, it did what I wanted and took five minutes to get up and running.
The remaining problem was that the Twitter feed prefaces each item with an @fultonchain (my username). This is kind of redundant when included on a weblog but something I have no control over. What I do have control over is what is displayed and another TXP plugin, an7_filter, made it easy for me to replace the ‘@fultonchain’ with whitespace.
Thanks to Textpattern, the total time from conception to implementation was about fifteen minutes. It doesn’t get much easier.
377 days ago
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