My Twitter List!

Twitter just updated not too long ago with their new Lists feature and I thought it would make a great opportunity to create my own list of my iPhone apps and whatever other applications I create that could warrant a Twitter account. So check out my new Twitter List at http://twitter.com/swemoney/apps and follow the hell out of it!

Update: I changed the name of the list to just “apps” so it’s much easier to remember..

Plurk the new Twitter??

With twitter’s very simple UI and constant downtime, it was only a matter of time before a new micro-blogging service came to fruition. I know there’s Jaiku and Pownce and probably a dozen other sites that do almost the same thing but Plurk’s simple, but fun UI as well as their quirky and weird sense of humor has led me to start ‘plurking’ some more. It just feels more fun to play and ‘plurk’ than it ever did to tweet. Go check it out. Signup it super quick so there’s very little time between you and some plurking fun! x=)

What Pownce Needs…

I’m sure there are a dozen of articles like this on the web but I’m too lazy to go find them so instead, I’ll post my own review and ideas on what pownce still needs to take over twitter.

Personally, I love twitter for it’s simplicity. It’s incredibly easy to use and there are so many different ways in which you can interact with the twitter service, it’s great! Pownce has recently started it’s beta to a lot of speculation about it being the ‘twitter killer’. I’ll definitely give it credit. I think pownce is very well designed and stable definately has the potential to be a twitter killer, but it’s not there yet. A few things I’m going to have to see before I can drop my twitter and use pownce exclusively are as follows..

1. 4 Themes?? Really?? Is this really a feature people are going to be dropping the $20 a year for? I’m not. If I do upgrade to the pro account, it’s to get rid of the ads on my page and be able to send larger files (and I’m sure other cooler features that might be included in the future?). I’m not going to spend money just to use some new themes. I like the themes idea, but let’s make them all free and let’s add another option for giving users the really simple customization options you find with twitter. Like changing the background color/picture and changing the color of various elements. That’s all I really need for customizations.

2. Text updates. I love the SMS integration for twitter. I can be anywhere and send a nice text message to 40404 and have it turn in to my newest tweet. I know this is going to be a little more challenging for pownce because of the various types of update you can post and being able to post to certain people but use some default options that users can set and let’s get our SMS on! Also, I know it’s really small and simple, but I really love twitter’s ‘nudge’ after 24 hours without an update. When I get that text message, I already have my phone out so I can just reply and let the world know what I’m doing. It’s the little things. x=)

3. A real API. I know that people have started to document the private API that the desktop applications use. And I know that the pownce team is working on a public API. But this is just something else that I’m waiting for to bring it up to a twitter level.

4. Ruby on Rails. Yaaa.. This isn’t going to change, but a special place in my heart will always remain for twitter because it’s one of the first huge web applications written in my language of choice. So this is the one thing pownce will never have over twitter. x=)

I think that’s the jist of it. The list isn’t huge. It’s definitely doable (except for the last one of course) and I’m actually fairly confident that in a rather short time, all these issues will be resolved and we’ll see how I feel about it again at that time. For now, I’m going to stick with twitter for the majority of my updates and use pownce on occasion just to see what’s new or whatever.

A couple fixes.. Some news..

I finally went ahead and whipped up a quick hack for mephisto to allow me to keep my twitter status and last.fm status updated without killing mephisto’s great caching features. Previously, I was using Dan Webb’s lastfm plugin for mephisto, and my recent modification to the same plugin to make it fetch twitter information instead of lastfm information. This works, to a degree, but the problem comes from the fact that this plugin uses a liquid tag that embeds the xml information on the page. What this means, is that mephisto will cache the page with the current status or lastfm list and recent updates won’t appear until the cache gets flushed. I know there’s a ‘setting’ in dan webb’s plugin that allows you to change the time in which mephisto will auto flush the cache and try to update the page, but it never worked for me.

What I did was create an Ajax request at the bottom of the page that updates the twitter and lastfm information on the fly. This means that the page that mephisto caches will always stay the same. The updates to twitter and lastfm will happen behind the scenes and update the page w/ javascript. Sucks for those of you who don’t have javascript enabled, but works for me. x=)

I want to whip up a versatile plugin for mephisto with this functionality, but that might take a little bit of time for me to pull off correctly and all. I just started a new job serving at a comedy club in the area, so that’s going to take some of my time in the near future, but I promise that as soon as I get some time and figure out how I want to do it, I’ll get this out in a plugin form. It won’t be a plugin just for twitter and mephisto. I want to make it so you can parse any xml file and update any element on your page with that information on the fly so you can keep dynamic content on your site without killing the caches. Stay tuned for more info on this.

Mephisto Plugin for Twitter

I’m late to the bus. I just found twitter yesterday and I think it’s a pretty cool concept. It’s nothing entirely useful, but it’s just fun. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve HEARD of twitter, just never tried it out until yesterday. Also, yesterday, I started screwing around with Dan Webb’s mephisto plugin for lastfm. What do these 2 things have in common you might be wondering? After looking at how easy it was to grab an xml file with users timelines from twitter via their api, I realized how easy it would be to modify Dan’s excellent lastfm plugin to work with twitter. So that’s what I did. I created a quick edit of the lastfm mephisto plugin to create my very own twitter mephisto plugin!

It seems to work pretty well. I’m actually intending on making it a little more feature packed in the future. There’s not a whole lot more you can do with it considering Twitter’s super duper simplicity, but I might take a stab at adding basic authentication so you can view ALL of your timelines with this plugin or maybe even come up with some way that you can edit create new status messages from your blog or your blogs admin page (when mephisto matures a little more to support admin plugins). Anyways, enough blabbing by me. Here’s the 411 on how to use it.

Install it like so from your mephisto root.

script/plugin install http://svn.dnite.org/mephisto_twitter

Restart your mephisto (I’m pretty sure this is necisary to load up the new plugin) and you can edit your layout page (or any of your liquid pages) to include your twitter status!

{% twittertimeline user: 'swemoney', type: 'user_timeline' as status %}
  {{ status.text }} - {{ status.relative_created_at }}
{% endtwittertimeline %}

If you want to know where your at in the loop, twittertimeline.index will return that for you. Any questions, post them here!