Tweeter Feetchers

I swear, I put off being a Twitter user for a long time (despite my signing up for it very, very early to get a premium username before I'd eventually be relegated to being "AaronSk8erboi839191_4") but I had to build in some Twitter-related features to some websites I was doing for clients and work and that put the bug in me. It's ridiculous how easy it is to make custom applications to fetch and display tweets of any classification.

And then I moved here to Chicago and I felt like the people from back home would probably have a slight, slight interest in what was going on with me, but with a full time job it was hard to find the energy to write full-on blog posts, so Twitter it was.

When I decided that I was comfortable with it and that I wasn't going to drop it, I decided to make my tweets get pumped directly onto my blog here so that I wouldn't have to explain to my parents what/who/how/why/where a Twitter was, and just to generally make life easier. Also because I like to make things that do things with data from other places. It's my thing.

So I took some code I'd made for a client website to pull in tweets, changed a few things, and plopped it onto this site here.

That's worked out pretty well, but my nature doesn't allow me to let a good thing remain good when I could screw around with it and make it better, so I just added a few more features:

Firewall Bypassery

A few people whose workplaces have firewalls that block Twitter have told me that this prevents the display of Twitter content here. That makes sense, because my script is just telling your browser to get a data feed from Twitter and then interpret it, but it also cheesed me off pretty hard. I didn't like the idea of my website breaking for people at work because of IT policies put in place to prevent secretaries from wasting time at Friendface and Twitbook and such.

So I've added a thing that tries to detect when the script is having trouble fetching the tweets, and then will (unobtrusively) ask the user if they're behind a firewall. Answering "Yes" will attempt to bypass any firewalls using a homespun proxy. I may remove the whole confirmation thing and just attempt the proxy automatically if the first attempt fails, but I liked the look of the confirmation message...

Geolocation/Stalker Enhancements

Twitter recently started allowing for tweets to be encoded with the geo-coordinates of whereever you happened to be when you sent that message (if whatever you're using to send the message allows for it). My phone allows for it, so when I tweet from my phone it includes the location. Even though it kind of creeps me out, I thought it was cool enough that I now display any geo-location information that may exist along with a tweet. You may, on certain messages, see something like this:

The general location of the message is displayed in text form, and if you click the location (or the little pin icon) it will take you to a Google Map showing exactly (exaaaactly) where I was. I think this can supply a little context to messages, the benefit of which should hopefully outweigh the creepiness. Please do not use this information to murder me.

Image Auto-Thumbnailing

Basically, if I link to a TwitPic or Flickr image in a tweet, the script will try to generate a thumbnail for them. Yeah. Fancy stuff.