Posted by synedra on Nov 30, 2008 in
Uncategorized After I got my new sidebar widget working, I thought I’d go and see if any more of my friends were listed on Twitter, and discovered to my chagrin that they have elected to remove the “search for people” function on Twitter. It’s been replaced by an “Allow Twitter to Rifle Your Rolodex” function where it looks to see if anyone you know is on twitter – and then does the super annoying Facebook-like list of everyone who isn’t enTwittered yet – “These losers haven’t signed up yet. Spam them for us!” Yeah, no.
Two third party folks have made cool applications to replace this functionality. Neither is perfect (and they’re both pretty overwhelmed), but they’re better than nothing. You can find people with the name of <whatever> at
twitterdir, and you can find friends-of-friends at
twubble. I had a lot of fun futzing with the latter this morning.
Your other alternative is to google “site:twitter.com Kirsten Jones”
Note that if you play with twubble for too long, Twitter will throttle you, and you’ll end up with no functionality for your cool sidebar widget thing for an hour while you contemplate the error of your ways.
Posted by synedra on Nov 24, 2008 in
Geek Stuff In my job as an elf for Santa, I frequently have to travel back to the North Pole to visit with my fellow elves, so it’s not always easy to tell where I might be. Given that fact, and my desire to procrastinate a bit, I decided to make a handy badge for my blog that tells people where I am. Most twitter clients allow you to throw some location information in your posts, so it’s relatively easy to make it relatively easy for someone to stalk you.
So, I started with this excellent
post describing how to make a basic twitter (Javascript/HTML) badge. That page has some handy information on how to set up a badge with no location, and if you don’t want location, you should probably follow his guide. But if you want to add in some location information as well, then here’s the info you need.
First, you’ll need to create a local Javascript file to do your evil bidding. I plopped mine in my mt-static directory (because I use Movable Type) but you can put it in any static spot on your server. You can grab mine
here.
Now that you’ve got that put on your server, you just need to put some code in your blog template (wherever your other badge stuff is) to get your fabulous information to show up. The code for the HTML looks yucky in my post, but you can view source and grab the stuff marked as “TWITTER”.
The last piece is styling your box. I have mine styled so that it matches the rest of my site, but you can make yours work however you like.
#twitter_div {
border-bottom-style: solid;
border-bottom-width: 1px;
margin-bottom: 10px;
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 0.9em;
padding-right: 5px;
padding-left: 5px;
text-decoration: none;
}
#twitter_location {
margin-left: 25px;
text-decoration: none;
margin-bottom: 10px;
}
#twitter_div ul li {
text-decoration: none;
border-bottom-style: solid;
border-bottom-width: 1px;
padding-bottom: 5px;
margin-bottom: 5px;
}
#twitter_div p {
text-align: right;
padding-right: 6px;
margin-bottom: 10px;
}
Tags: location, twitter