nicholasjon.com :: a weblog >> posts tagged: twitter

_why 881768089

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 15:30:21 GMT

when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create. _why

Launched: pnt.me

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 02:57:39 GMT

When the dot-me domains were released a few weeks ago, I thought it might be fun to pick one up and officially launch some “url shortening” code I’d been experimenting with. Today I managed to put the finishing touches on the first version of pnt.me — which I think looks a lot like “point me,” but won’t waste any extra characters in your tweets.

It’s a standard url shortener, meaning you give it a link that looks something like http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&pwst=1&q=url+shortening&start=10&sa=N and it gives you back something more like http://pnt.me/CzwU9K.

It does have a few other features:

There’s a “copy to clipboard” link, saving you the trouble of highlighting, right-clicking, and so on. Not huge, but nice.
Adding a semi-colon to the end of any link will forgo automatic redirection, and instead take users to the “details” page for that link. Check it out: http://pnt.me/CzwU9K;. It’s useful for those times you want to see exactly where you’re going, instead of being Rickrolled.
There’s also the beginnings of a sort of spam-alert, in that if enough people have clicked the abuse link the automatic redirection stops. Users are instead taken to the details page and shown a warning letting them know them know there have been reported problems with the content behind the shortened link. Everyone can still get to their destination — but it’s at their own risk. I set up a fake one here http://pnt.me/PjgpM9; so you can see what I mean. (Update: Enough people clicked through anyway that the warning went away. I guess the system works.)

I’m working on a bookmarklet that will let you shorten links from anywhere on the web, but it’s got issues in IE. And sites with frames. And Wikipedia. (Like I said, I’m working on it.) Try it out if you like, your mileage may vary. I hope to have a new and improved (read: “working”) version up soon.

All in all, I’m quite happy with how things are coming together. It’s fun to polish and release code originally intended to just be a weekend project. Personally, I got a lot more out of the experience knowing it would be in front of someone other than me when it was finished.

Thanks to everyone on Twitter who helped test things out this afternoon. And extra thanks to Jaythan for adding some most-excellent style my wireframes.

Twitter API Goes Geo

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:59:22 GMT

I think including geography is going to be the killer feature in the next round of webapps. I’ve been waiting for Twitter to get in on the action. This will be cool.

Link: http://blog.programmableweb.com/2008/05/02/twitter-api-goes-geo/

nicholasjon 797650063

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 03:31:01 GMT

Alright, too windy for kites. Just snapped the main spar in my Revolution. Damn.

Twitter in plain English

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 02:07:20 GMT

By CommonCraft

nicholasjon 765778431

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 21:46:55 GMT

Just finished cleaning up after a badly botched software deploy that has finally enabled Twitter support on my blog.Nick Olejniczak

Twoosh

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:14:05 GMT

My first twoosh:

Thank you VH1 for reminding me that in 1984, during the making of Ghostbusters, Ray Parker Jr. was basically the poor man’s Michael Jackson.

Perfection, 140 characters at a time.

Twitter Fun

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Fri, 11 May 2007 05:27:11 GMT

In celebration of a little free time Sunday afternoon, I sat down and finally whipped together my first mashup.

I decided it would be fun to mess around with Twitter, because everyone is. And I decided it would be fun to play with the Yahoo! Maps API, because everyone else seems to be using Google’s. So I set about trying to visualize Twitter posts geographically.

Turns out, that’s pretty darn easy. (Probably why it’s already been done, but that’s okay.)

What I’ve got is a first cut, but I’m pretty happy with it. So now I’m curious? What else should it the map do? Let me know in the comments.

Scaling Rails via Twitter

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 16:14:42 GMT

The Twitter folk aren’t pleased with Rails scalability.

DHH points out the way their app was configured it was never really going to scale anyway, and that they certainly could improve their performance with more caching and more database servers. He does end on a sort of Rails is open source, you can always fix it yourself note, which is a little disingenuine.

Brian McCallister responds to the whole thing with I think the best perspective of all.

Update: Problem solved. (Dr Nic to the rescue.)

Update: And again. (This looks really promising.)

Update: And again. (Dr Nic again — he’s good.)