Just over a year ago (as my schedule seems to be) I released an update to my Twitter Statuses JavaScript Badge. Within two days I had further updates, including variables to override the name of the DIV element, hide the user’s icon, etc., ready to go, but I put it on the back burner as I was unhappy with the poor name-spacing.

About a month ago I rediscovered the postponed release, so this weekend I completely revamped my name-spacing. You know what that means? I better release v0.6 before I delay it again!

So, without further ado: Twitter Statuses JavaScript Badge v0.6

And the release notes are as follows:

Further namespacing improvements plus variables for defaults/settings. Re-implemented @reply filtering, limiting tweet count, and added changing of the element ID and disabling the icon.

This release really solidifies the base I’ve built up over the past few years and gives me something to build upon for the features I have in store.

Please let me know if you have any questions or feature requests.

Modern Warfare 2 will be out in a few days, so I felt @cowardswayout should count down to the release day. I could spend a few minutes at some point during each of the next few days—assuming I can remember to—posting a nearly-the-same message to Twitter or I could automate it. Yeah, better automate.

In trying to keep my bash-fu hightened, I tossed together the following bash script:

#!/bin/bash

# 
# mw2_countdown
# 
# Post countdown to Modern Warfare 2 release to Twitter every day
# 

release_year=2009
release_month=11
release_day=10
year=10#$(date +%Y)
month=10#$(date +%m)
day=10#$(date +%d)
username='cowardswayout'
password='somethingiwontleakhere'

if (( $release_year == $year && $release_month == $month && $day <= $release_day )); then
	if (( $day == $release_day )); then
		printf -v message "Modern Warfare 2 (http://bit.ly/dQMPz) is out! Go get your copy!"
	else
		printf -v message "Modern Warfare 2 (http://bit.ly/dQMPz) in %s..." $(( $release_day - $day ))
	fi	
	curl -u $username:$password -d status="$message" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
fi

Since I host with Mac OS X Server and am anal about doing things “The Mac Way”, I whipped up a launchd job to run it every morning at 1am:

<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>Label</key>
	<string>com.cowardswayout.mw2_countdown</string>
	<key>ProgramArguments</key>
	<array>
		<string>/usr/local/bin/mw2_countdown</string>
	</array>
	<key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
	<dict>  
		<key>Hour</key>
		<integer>1</integer>
		<key>Minute</key>
		<integer>0</integer>
	</dict>
</dict>
</plist>

As you can see, I installed the bash script in /usr/local/bin/mw2_countdown and the launchd job went in /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.cowardswayout.mw2_countdown.plist.

I changed the permissions so that only root has read/execute access to the bash script, since the Twitter account password is stored in plain text:

sudo chmod 700 /usr/local/bin/mw2_countdown

And loaded the launchd job:

sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.cowardswayout.mw2_countdown.plist

Now I only have to remember to remove the bash script and launchd job sometime after 11/10/09. Naturally, this script can be easily tailored to your own needs.

Update: I’ve updated the script to prepend 10# to each call like $(date +%y) to force it to be evaluated as base 10 and also switched from using test (square brackets) to using the correct arithmetic evaluations (double parentheses).

I’ve been getting an increasing number of questions about my JavaScript Twitter Statuses Badge as of late and this past week the most prominent questions have been regarding using multiple Twitter badges on the same page. Here’s an except from one of my answers via email:

As it stands, due to the way the Twitter API works, it will only display one per page. That said, it is definitely possible to make it work with the following hacks:

1. In the mtaTwitterStatuses.js file, you can duplicate the mtaTwitterCallback() function and name it something like mtaTwitterCallback2().

2. Also in mtaTwitterStatuses.js, you’d then have to modify the last line of your new function, mtaTwitterCallback2(), to replace document.getElementById('mtaTwitter').innerHTML with document.getElementById('mtaTwitter2').innerHTML (note the change to ‘mtaTwitter2’.

3. Then, in your HTML, you’d want to put <div id="mtaTwitter"></div> where you want your first badge, <div id="mtaTwitter2"></div> (note the same change to “mtaTwitter2”) where you want your second badge.

4. Also in your HTML, you’d want to put the following just before the </body> tag:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/morgant.json?callback=mtaTwitterCallback&amp;count=1"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/slottedpiginfo.json?callback=mtaTwitterCallback2&amp;count=1"></script>

Note the “mtaTwitterCallback” & “mtaTwitterCallback2” in the above, in addition to the two different twitter account names (“morgant” & “slottedpiginfo”, in this case).

I’m currently considering my options for implementing better support for multiple badges on the same page for a future release, but I hope this helps in the meantime.

I’ve got a new version of my JavaScript Twitter Statuses Badge out for you all.

This version, 0.4, includes some minor modifications to the regular expression for @replies to fix some formatting & issues when they were abutting punctuation.

I’ve also further reduced the amount of HTML you need to include down to a single DIV element (plus the JavaScript include & call, naturally). You’ll have to replace the HTML and probably tweak your CSS (only slightly) to handle the changes, but I don’t intend to change the HTML again for quite some time.

As always, the latest version can be downloaded from the development page.

Update: I’ve released version 0.4.1 with a README file containing an overview, basic instructions, and change log. There are no other changes, so if you don’t need the README, you don’t have to worry about updating.

First I wait nearly two years for an update and then only a matter of days. I had actually intended to release this update nearly immediately after the last update, but twitter was having some issues when I was attempting to complete my testing. This weekend’s testing was successful, so here’s the latest update to my Twitter Statuses Badge.

Version 0.3 now includes clickable @replies and links. Many thanks to René van Meurs for the regular expressions.

As always, the latest version can be downloaded from the development page.

I’ve updated my Twitter Statuses Badge to include Jon Aquino’s IE date parse fix, some function name changes to reduce the possibility of namespace clashes, and tweaked the CSS a tad.

It’s a tiny update to a nearly two year old hack, but hopefully it’s still helpful to many of you. Version 0.2 is now available from the development page.

Thomas Brand is at it again! This time he’s announced NewtonTips, a feed of Newton-related tips powered by Twitter. Complete with Mac OS X Dashboard Widget and all.

Now I have to admit, while I’m happy to see more Newton content flowing, I was quite surprised by its delivery: Twitter. I use it every day, I was on the fence about initially using it, and plenty of people use it as a news delivery medium, but I hadn’t thought of using it as your sole publishing platform. You essentially get free hosting & delivery of a few sentences worth of content via RSS and Twitter (so potentially web, AIM/Gmail instant messaging services, mobile SMS, and email).

More props to Thomas!

(And, yes, the title of this post is a bit of a shout-out to Dan Padilla’s now-silent Newton Dose blog.)

Yesterday Twitter added the ability to search for people so I set out to find out who else in Vermont is twittering away. A quick search for either "Vermont" or "VT" yields roughly 120 people (combined) which is a little better than I had expected. Oddly enough, the Vermont Teddy Bear Company is the only other twitterer that calls the Shelburne area home, but they have four different accounts that have only been updated once (and not for the past couple months, at that).

It’s good to see some fellow Vermonters plugging up the intertubes and to hear what they’re all up to!

A couple weeks ago, my friend Jimmy saw a modification of the Twitter JavaScript badge that I had whipped up for the coming site redesign and liked what he saw. He decided to integrate it into his site, but wanted a few more features: most notably, the ability to display more than once recent tweet.

So last week I took an hour to clean it up and improve it. The end result is as follows:

The main features of this modification are:

• The twitterer’s icon, which links to their twitter page.
• One or more of the twitterer’s recent tweets.
• Tweet date-stamp that links to that tweet’s permalink.
• More CSS hooks for more advanced styling, including: ‘first’, ‘last’, ‘even’, and ‘odd’ classes on the list item tags.

You can download following package which contains a stand-alone copy of the JavaScript, plus an example theme (CSS) for it that mimics much of the Twitter look (as seen above):

twitter_statuses_badge

Please note that the included example CSS stylesheet does not render exactly as intended in Firefox and has not been tested in Internet Explorer for Windows. It was hacked together pretty quickly and tested in Safari, but does fail fairly gracefully in IE for Mac¹. I’ll leave those fixes as an exercise for the reader.

I’d highly suggest also taking a peek at Jon Aquino’s modifications as well, because he’s got a fix for date parsing in IE (it doesn’t appear to work in IE for the Mac, though) and provides a similar hack with no additional CSS hooks and such.

I do intend to release additional features that I’m currently developing for my site so check the development page for the latest release.

I hope you all find it useful! I also am interested to hear if anyone wants it wrapped into a Textpattern plug-in.

Update: There were some errors in the gzipped-tarball that have been fixed and I now also provide a zip archive alternative.

Another Update: Version 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.6.1 has been released and is available from the development page.

¹ If I didn’t personally have a collection of Classic Macs, I probably wouldn’t even bother testing it anymore.

[Note: Twitter stopped supporting IM connections, including Jabber, long ago so this post is no longer relevant. That said, it looks like Adium 1.4 will include Twitter support.]

Honestly, I had taken a little time off from worrying about my Twitter & Adium integration for a while there, since the Twitter IM service was cat-napping anyway, but I’m back into the full swing of it again. Since my previous post regarding Twitter and Adium working together using the TwitterAdium plug-in still gets so many hits, I figured I had better post an update so that I don’t confuse anybody since the landscape has changed a little bit. Fortunately, everything is a lot sunnier now in TwitterAdium land.

First, TwitterAdium is up to version 1.1 and has fixed many of the timeout issues I had previously experienced. It should now be much friendlier to Twitter’s servers, so that’s a plus for everyone. You can also add twitteradium as a Twitter friend to receive notifications of future updates.

Second, and most importantly, the Twitter API was updated a while ago (I didn’t pay attention as to exactly when) and so you’ll now have to modify your ~/.twitter file (as noted here) for the new format, if you haven’t already:

username: XXXX
email: bla@bla.com
password: secret

So, if you had previously created a ~/.twitter file and it contained a line starting with “userid” then you’ll need to replace it with “username” instead. So, the “username” line now actually refers to your username (so “morgant”, in my case) and no longer your rarely-seen-these-days ID number (which is “39063”, in my case).

Once you update your ~/.twitter file, then Twitter and Adium will be super best friends! Seriously though, this has been working very well for me lately and I’m glad I went this route (as opposed to, say, trying to get my Adium status messages posted to Twitter or not doing it at all).

Once they re-enable the ability to follow your friends with AIM, I’ll be all set. In the meantime I’ve had to switch to one of my Jabber accounts.

42

One added tidbit that I’m not sure how many people understand (noted here), but which I frequently get asked about by my friends, is that the maximum character limit for AIM “available” messages is 42. So, since Twitter allows 140 characters, all your long messages will get cut off. However, AIM does not impose this restriction on “away” messages, so your Twitter message will be displayed in full as your away status and your auto-reply.

Also, I believe that AIM “available” messages are only displayed on the Mac anyway, so only your Mac¹ friends will complain that your available status is cut off.

Update: TwitterAdium is now at version 1.2, as of May 7th, 2007.

¹ It seems that my number of Mac friends is increasing quite a bit faster these days, and I’ve been a Mac user and evangelist for years. They all seem to be happier with the transition and the life than every before, which is a very good thing.

Update: Please don’t follow any instructions in this article as the APIs have changed somewhat. It’s still worth a read, but make changes as directed in the updated post instead.

So, with Adium’s recent explanation as to why version 1.0 has been under development for so long, and their stating that, “it’s almost ready. 1.0 is almost done,” I figured the beta is probably stable enough for me to test.

I backed up my current Adium application and settings:

<notextile>mv ~/Applications/Adium.app ~/Applications/Adium\ 0.89.1.app</notextile>
<notextile>tar -czpf adium_backup-2007-01-31.tar.gz ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adium\ 2.0 ~/Library/Preferences/com.adiumX.adiumX.plist</notextile>

...and proceeded to install the latest beta. The upgrade was smooth and my settings & chat transcripts were preserved, so I was up and running very quickly.

However, as you may remember, my goal for using the Twitter service was to unify my status updates. Post once, display everywhere. And I was going to do this using the TwitterAdium Adium Xtra, which only works with the 1.0 branch of Adium.

Installing TwitterAdium was a breeze as well, thanks to Adium’s built-in Xtras installation capabilities (one click from the web). However, the configuration of <notextile>~/.twitter</notextile> does not work as described. There are three lines which you have to fill in in said file:

userid: XXXX
<notextile>email: blabla.com password: secret@

What is not explained is that userid is not your Twitter “username”, but a unique number. The easiest way to find this is to hover over the link to your Twitter status RSS feed. For example, my RSS feed link is:

http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/39063.rss

So, my userid is actually 39063, not “morgant”. Once my <notextile>~/.twitter</notextile> file had the correct data in it, TwitterAdium worked as advertised.

I set my status in Adium to <notextile>%_Twitter</notextile> (or, occasionally, I mix and match with other Xtras), then just send my status updates via AIM to twitterim. If only someone would update the Quicksilver Adium Plug-in...