David Alber » twitter

Blackbird Pie Caching Experiment

David Alber — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 21:40:33 +0000

I decided to do an experiment to verify that Blackbird Pie is caching tweets locally. If it does not, then it makes more sense to stick with Lifestream for everything or to use screen captures.

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For more context on what this post is about, see “Site Revamp, Again — Now Embedding Tweets“.

Site Revamp, Again — Now Embedding Tweets

David Alber — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 20:39:26 +0000

At the beginning of the year, I added the right sidebar that contains content from my Twitter account. The motivation was to automatically capture tweets I make, most of which are retweets referring to articles I have read. I like that the content is automatically captured (although a lot ends up being redundant), but I do not like that it is in a different “stream” than my blog posts. All of the information is kept in sequence on the feed streams page, but that is not quite what I want. For instance, there is no way to comment here about any of those tweets, so for a while I have wanted a way to get tweets inlined in the blog feed.

Enter Blackbird Pie, which learned about yesterday from here. This provides a simple way to embed tweets into posts, keeping the links in the tweet active. For example:

"Geneagrapher 0.2.1-r1 Released". http://davidalber.net/?p=1031

November 3, 2010 10:35 pm via webReply RetweetFavorite

@DavidAlber

David Alber

The downside of this is that capturing the tweets is not automated, but given how I am pulling tweets onto this site and tweeting about posts here, maybe that is a good thing. Perhaps some day I will find or write something to implement the cross-posting logic I want, but for now it is not that big of a burden to do it manually.

Here’s the initial plan: I will start embedding tweets, but also will keep using Lifestream for the right sidebar and the feed streams page (I am too busy to adjust the site style right now anyway).

Site Revamp

David Alber — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 03:50:38 +0000

I have already hinted that I read many articles that I feel are worth sharing, but never get around to writing anything about them. Explanations of this behavior include being busy, lazy, or not really having much to say, other than something is interesting. As described earlier, this leads to a build up in the various (lame) places that I store the links. To mitigate this, I have started using Twitter to make small posts about these interesting articles. That’s all fine and good, but that means my reader(s) has(ve) to check two places. I preferred the idea of having all of it in one place, hence the revamp of parts of the site. I am now using Lifestream to pull in my Twitter feed and displaying that in the new, right sidebar of the blog pages.

Since it has been a while since I messed with CSS, I had to tinker around with stuff for a while to get it right. I found some insight about float elements here and got a lot of help getting my second sidebar in place by looking at this example.

Consider this a technical preview for the moment because I have not modified all of the page templates to work with the new stylesheets. That’s why the tags page, for example, is missing its sidebars. I will fix it soon, but I need to move to another task for now.