A very timely post on using If This Then That to automatically post notes from your own site (via RSS) to Twitter and Mastodon.
I’ve set this up for my Mastodon profile.
This is going to make me sound like an old man in his rocking chair on the front porch, but let me tell you about the early days of Twitter…
The first time I mentioned Twitter on here was back in November 2006:
I’ve been playing around with Twitter, a neat little service from the people who brought you Odeo. You send it little text updates via SMS, the website, or Jabber.
A few weeks later, I wrote about some of its emergent properties:
Overall, Twitter is full of trivial little messages that sometimes merge into a coherent conversation before disintegrating again. I like it. Instant messaging is too intrusive. Email takes too much effort. Twittering feels just right for the little things: where I am, what I’m doing, what I’m thinking.
That’s right; back then we didn’t have the verb “tweeting” yet.
In those early days, some of the now-ubiquitous interactions had yet to emerge. Chris hadn’t yet proposed hashtags. And if you wanted to address a message to a specific person—or reply to a tweet of theirs—the @ symbol hadn’t been repurposed for that. There were still few enough people on Twitter that you could just address someone by name and they’d probably see your message.
That’s what I was doing when I posted:
I’m assuming Simon Willison got a haircut or something.
In any case, it’s an innocuous and fairly pointless tweet. And yet, in the intervening years, that tweet has received many replies. Weirdly, most of the replies consisted of one word:
nice
Very puzzling.
Then a little while back, I realised what was happening. This is the URL for my tweet:
twitter.com/adactio/status/69420
69420.
69.
420.
Pesky kids with their stoner sexual-innuendo numerology!
Now that all modern browsers support SVG favicons, here’s how to turn any emoji into a favicon.svg:
<svg xmlns="http://w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 100 100"> <text y=".9em" font-size="90"> 💩 </text> </svg>Useful for quick apps when you can’t be bothered to design a favicon!
I fully expect my personal website to outlive Twitter and as such have decided to take full ownership of the content I’ve posted there. In true IndieWeb fashion, I’m taking ownership of my data.
This could’a, should’a, would’a been a great blog post.
March 1981: Shakin’ Stevens was top of the charts, Tom Baker was leaving Doctor Who and Clive Sinclair was bringing computers to the masses. Britain was moving into a new age, and one object above all would herald its coming.
When I designed the Science Hack Day logo, I never expected to one day see it recreated with florescent E. coli.
If you’re at all interested in public speaking, this is a great insight by Lara into what it’s like on the day of a talk.
There’s something about this that I really like: a message transmitted via a modern communications medium converted into the oldest form of writing.
I’d like to do this for all Clearleft web projects.
How important is mobile for @nytimes? We’re blocking access to our home page on desktop in our building.
Primer, but Twitter.
A fascinating bit of linguistic spelunking from Craig Hockenberry, in which he tracks down the earliest usage of “tweet” as a verb relating to Twitter.
Basically, it’s all Blaine’s fault.
There’s something quite lovely about this: pairs of tweets that are anagrams of one another.
A little piece of JavaScript to strip out the styling from Twitter widgets.
Oh, no! How horrid! Now Twitter won’t control the “user experience” of that widget!
Instead, the person who actually posted the tweets in the first place gets to decide how they should be displayed. Crazy idea, isn’t it?
I need to get Matt to an Indie Web Camp.
A cute little read-only Twitter client from James that only displays fully-formed tweets: no hashtags, no @-replies.
Lance Arthur uses a tweet from Paul Ford as a starting point for a text adventure.
Strangers on a train.
Kellan explains the tech behind Old Tweets …and also the thinking behind it:
I think our history is what makes us human, and the push to ephemerality and disposability “as a feature” is misguided. And a key piece of our personal histories is becoming “the story we want to remember”, aka what we’ve shared.
A public service from Kellan: the ability to search through your oldest tweets.