CrunchBang - Code, Design & GNU/Linux

All Twittered Out

I have been using Twitter on and off for several months. Some of the time the service works, the remainder of the time I am reliably informed that "Something is technically wrong." Currently, Twitter is the only web based application I use on a regular basis which breaks just as regularly as I use it.

If Twitter provided an important service, email for example, I would have stopped using it in favour of something more reliable; however, arguably, Twitter does not provide an important service, so I have persevered with its less than reliable service, though I have to admit, my patience is wearing thin.

Should not the Twitter experience be fun?

For me, Twitter has stopped being a fun distraction and has become something which I like to do, but more often than not, I end up feeling frustrated when I do. Problem is, I have become comfortable with keeping a virtual diary of day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute distractions. I also enjoy the sporadic conversations which occur between mutual followers.

Do not misunderstand me, I think the basis of the Twitter service, "What are you doing?", is valid and simple enough to remain being a great idea; however, for fear of stating the obvious, I do not think the Twitter service is currently scaling well enough to cope with the digital populace. And more worryingly [at least for the Twitter developers], I am not sure it ever will, not in its current guise and regardless of the underlying technologies.

Ah b∗ll∗cks!

Also, there is something which has been bugging me about Twitter, the fact that it is hosting my data. The data in question, may on the surface seem unimportant, and for the large part it is; however, on occasion I have found myself wanting needing to refer to my backlog of tweets, only to find the Twitter service lacking, again.

As an example, only the other day, Becky and I wanted to watch an episode of a certain serial drama and neither of us could remember the last episode we had watched. Ah ha! I thought, I will search my Twitter history, I am sure to have tweeted about it. The following conversation went something like:

me: Ah b∗ll∗cks!
Becky: What's wrong?
me: Something technical!

If I was hosting the tweets myself, I feel certain the above short conversation would never have taken place. I would have been able to search my data, find the information I needed and carry on with my otherwise happy existence.

What are you doing?

I am feeling all Twittered out, not with the concept, but with the service. I am going to rectify this by developing my own mini Twitteresque application. The application will provide similar functionality to Twitter, but obviously it will be served from my own hosting account. The application will store my tweets within its own database as well as pushing them to Twitter. Ideally, once the application is running, nobody, apart from myself, should notice any difference as it will appear as though I am Twittering as normal.

Thank you Twitter

Twitter got me hooked on keeping a diary of meaningless events, but then left me wanting. So, thank you Twitter, I now have a new project to keep me amused for a while.

End rant. Start project.

TwitterZoid PHP Script

It's a rather silly name, I know; however, TwitterZoid is the chosen name of my PHP script for parsing Twitter RSS feeds. I've been using Twitter quite steadily for a couple of weeks now and I thought it might be nice to include my latest tweets on my blog, so I wrote TwitterZoid to do just that.

TwitterZoid differs to other PHP based Twitter RSS parsers, at least the ones I tried before I wrote it, in that it will automatically link both lexicons and URLs found within individual tweets. It also tries to mimic Twitter's timestamping, although this could be improved.

TwitterZoid usage

I wanted to make TwitterZoid as simple to use as possible. Therefore I decided to write the script to be used as a simple include file which can be used on any PHP page. Basically, to use TwitterZoid all you need to do is set a couple of variables, include twitterzoid.php and then echo the main $TwitterZoid variable where you would like your list of tweets to appear.

Example set-up:

$twitter_username = "corenominal";
$twitter_feed = "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/99713.rss";
require_once('twitterzoid.php');

Call on the main TwitterZoid variable to produce the list of tweets:

echo $TwitterZoid;

Don't worry if this reads like gibberish, I've included an example page within the download.

TwitterZoid examples

There are currently two demonstrations of TwitterZoid in action, see:

My official "What am I doing?" Twitter page:
http://crunchbang.org/what-am-i-doing/

A more stylised version of "What am I doing?", included within the download:
http://crunchbang.org/projects/twitterzoid/demo/

Download TwitterZoid

Location: http://crunchbang.org/projects/twitterzoid/twitterzoid-0.1.tar.gz
MD5: 99dace9f9872cf1ebf93588bb2d36458

TwitterZoid license

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/

Twitter, Twitux, gTwitter & Mono

Twitter, I guess it's one of those web applications where you either "get" it or you don't. For a long time I stood firmly in the don't "get" it camp. My history with Twitter is somewhat scattered, I posted my first couple of tweets on December 21, 2006. It was a while until I tweeted again, when I did it took the following form:

Testing twitter on my Nokia N95 06:15 AM January 22, 2008 from web

And then 7 days later I tweeted again:

Once again playing with twitter, still not sure that I "get" it! Hmm. 02:52 PM January 29, 2008 from web

And then just a few hours later:

Testing gTwitter on Ubuntu. Looks good but uses mono and therefore comes in at a rather large 20MB+, hmm. 07:52 PM January 29, 2008 from web

And then today I tweeted this:

Testing Twitux twitter client, looks good and doesn't use mono like gtwitter. This I could use, will leave it running. about 14 hours ago from web

By George, I think I'm beginning to "get" it!

It's only taken me a couple of years, but I think I'm beginning to understand what Twitter is all about. Twitter is a simple little application, at least from a user's standpoint, where you input up-to 140 character messages. These messages can then be viewed by anyone who wishes to follow along. It's quite simple really and I'm now confused by why it took me so long to come to terms with such a simple concept. Why didn't I get the hint from Twitter's front page?

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Anyhow, as you might have read, I've now started using Twitux. The application was introduced to me by Gabriel D. W. Wollenburg. I've only had it running for day, but I like it, and it beats having to keep another tab open in Epiphany. Unfortunately the application isn't available in the Ubuntu repositories, but you can grab a copy from getdeb.net. It's a small download at about 66.8 KB and only takes seconds to install using gdebi.

Regarding gTwitter, it crashed on first use, this didn't leave a good first impression. Secondly, it uses Mono. I have nothing against Mono, but so far CrunchBang Linux remains a Mono free system, at least it does for me. So, installing gTwitter, which is available from the Ubuntu repositories, gave me an apt-get output something along the lines of:

corenominal@misspiggy:~$ sudo apt-get install gtwitter
[sudo] password for corenominal:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
 libart2.0-cil libgconf2.0-cil libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil
 libgnome-vfs2.0-cil libgnome2.0-cil libgtk2.0-cil libgtkhtml2.0-cil
 libgtkhtml3.8-15 libmono-cairo1.0-cil libmono-corlib1.0-cil
 libmono-data-tds1.0-cil libmono-security1.0-cil libmono-sharpzip0.84-cil
 libmono-system-data1.0-cil libmono-system-web1.0-cil libmono-system1.0-cil
 libmono0 libmono1.0-cil librsvg2.0-cil mono-common mono-gac mono-jit
 mono-runtime
Suggested packages:
 libgtkhtml3.8-dbg libgda2-3 libgdiplus
Recommended packages:
 binfmt-support cli-common
The following NEW packages will be installed
 gtwitter libart2.0-cil libgconf2.0-cil libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil
 libgnome-vfs2.0-cil libgnome2.0-cil libgtk2.0-cil libgtkhtml2.0-cil
 libgtkhtml3.8-15 libmono-cairo1.0-cil libmono-corlib1.0-cil
 libmono-data-tds1.0-cil libmono-security1.0-cil libmono-sharpzip0.84-cil
 libmono-system-data1.0-cil libmono-system-web1.0-cil libmono-system1.0-cil
 libmono0 libmono1.0-cil librsvg2.0-cil mono-common mono-gac mono-jit
 mono-runtime
0 upgraded, 25 newly installed, 0 to remove and 37 not upgraded.
Need to get 6173kB of archives.
After unpacking 22.0MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

While I'm not short of disk space, 22MB for a Twitter client is somewhat extreme. Besides, I prefer Twitux.

Finally, I'd just like to publicly thank Gouki for encouraging me to explore Twitter some more. Gouki is without a doubt the main cause of all my time wasting experiences. BTW Gouki, I've still not forgiven you for this ;)

You can follow along with my pointless twittering at: http://twitter.com/corenominal