Posts tagged ‘twitter’
Archiving tweets
July 4th, 2012 at 12:46 am by Dr. Drang
Last night, Justin Blanton wrote about this interesting IFTTT recipe that archives your tweets in a plain text file in Dropbox. This morning, people began tweeting about it as they realized how nice it would be to have an archive like that sitting on your computer, always up to date within a few minutes. Brett…
The Twitter spam challenge
March 29th, 2012 at 11:26 pm by Dr. Drang
I loved this article on Twitter spam reporting by Ryan Irelan from a few days ago, and not just because it showed Dr. Twoot to be the most efficient. As Ryan says at the top of the post, Twitter spam is a big problem. Post a tweet that contains popular keywords (“iPad”, “iPhone”) and it’s…
Yet another Twitter post
March 7th, 2012 at 9:33 pm by Dr. Drang
I realize I’ve been on a Twitter kick here lately, and I don’t want to overdo it, but there are two more Twittery things I want to mention. First, there’s this notice from Twitter, reminding developers (and that’s anyone who’s written any kind of program, script, or extension that interacts with the Twitter API) that…
Scholarship, Twitter, and the MLA
March 5th, 2012 at 10:19 pm by Dr. Drang
The Modern Language Association, known to college students throughout the land for its MLA Handbook, has a style guide for citing a tweet. I saw this article about it at The Atlantic over the weekend and promptly forgot about it until today, when Ricky Mondello (@rmondello) retweeted a link to a similar story by NPR.…
Six Twitter rules
March 2nd, 2012 at 11:22 pm by Dr. Drang
Consciously or not, everyone has a set of guidelines for Twitter that govern both how they tweet and what they’re willing to tolerate in the tweets of those they follow. Most of these rules have to do with content. Political tweets, religious tweets, anti-religious tweets, what-I-had-for-breakfast tweets, hashtag-of-the-day tweets—any of these can make you beloved…
TiVo’d tweets
February 29th, 2012 at 11:07 pm by Dr. Drang
OK, I realize that posts about Dr. Twoot aren’t especially useful or interesting to anyone other than me, but I need to finish off what I started two nights ago: a TiVo-like system for viewing my Twitter stream with a time delay. My motivation is straightforward. I often record live TV shows like the Oscars…
Viewing tweets on delay
February 27th, 2012 at 11:07 pm by Dr. Drang
Last night, during that brief period after I started watching the Oscars and before I fell asleep, I had an idea: Twitter clients need a “TiVo mode,” in which incoming tweets are delayed by an adjustable period to match how far behind real time you are. — Dr. Drang (@drdrang) Sun Feb 26 2012 Brilliant, right?…
One-button Twitter spam reporting
February 19th, 2012 at 10:24 pm by Dr. Drang
Last year, I added some elementary spam detection and reporting to Dr. Twoot, my homemade Twitter client. It worked well enough at the time, but Twitter spammers have changed the format of their tweets and the detection algorithm just isn’t catching the bulk of the spam I get anymore. So I’ve updated Dr. Twoot by…
Blackbird.py and background images
January 29th, 2012 at 11:42 pm by Dr. Drang
In his comment on last night’s post about that fraction with the interesting decimal representation, Matthew McVickar pointed out a bug in my system for displaying tweets: I’m curious about the background in that embedded tweet of mine. My Twitter profile background is solid blue, and I don’t have a background image set. Looking up…
My life as a Twitter spammer
January 28th, 2012 at 9:52 am by Dr. Drang
Something weird is going on with Twitter’s shortened links. I don’t know how it’s happening, but there must be several people on Twitter who think I’m using fake accounts to spam them with links to one of my posts. I get many visits from people following links from the t.co domain, Twitter’s own link shortening…
