pig-monkey.com - twitter

Recently I was sent a link to a Twitter thread.

2018-11-29T00:00:00-08:00

Apparently this is a phenomena wherein the twatter submits a series of short tweets, each preceded by a sequence number, which when run strung together resembles something that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a paragraph, and nearly manages to communicate a complete thought. It is unclear whether users demonstrating this symptom are unaware that there are places on the internet without arbitrary character limits, or if their identity is so heavily invested in a third-party platform that they are simply unable to communicate outside of it. Needless to say, I retreated to saner shores.

Leaving Twitter Behind

2012-11-23T00:00:00-08:00

The web has been moving more and more towards a centralized structure. Services like Twitter, Facebook, Google and Flickr are all examples of this. To me, it is a disturbing trend. It’s bad for the internet as a whole, and on a more personal level is damaging to individual liberty and freedom. Lately, I’ve been making a stronger effort to forgo these services.

During the year that I took off from blogging, I maintained a steady presence on Twitter. When I decided to relaunch my blog, I knew I wanted to integrate Twitter-like microblogging into the site somehow. Looking over my Twitter history, it was clear that I was predominately using the service for one thing: sharing links. There’s no reason that I couldn’t do that on my blog. In fact, some of the earliest web logs were simply lists of interesting links.

I rarely participate in conversations on Twitter. I find it to be a horrible medium for that. Conversations that begin with microblog posts can be handled with any blog comment software (and I think the resulting experience is much improved over what Twitter can offer). If you use Twitter to contact people and start conversations, a blog probably won’t work for you. (But there’s a great distributed social networking platform out there that you might want to look into. It’s called email.)

Initially I considered adding a new model to vellum for microposts. When I thought about what a micropost is and what I wanted to do with them, I decided that modifying vellum was unnecessary. I’ve seen some people claim that microposts don’t have titles, but I think that’s incorrect: the primary content is the title. In addition to the title, the micropost needs a place to include the URL that is being shared. Why not just put that in the post body? The URL can simply be pasted into the field, ala Twitter, or included as an anchor tag contained within a new sentence. All that I needed was to uniquely style the microposts.

I decided to place all microposts in a new micro category. Posts in that category are then styled differently. This allows the user to quickly differentiate these short microposts from the more traditional, long-form articles. It also helps to represent the relationship of the title and the rest of the post.

With this in place, I no longer had a need for Twitter, but I still wanted to feed all of my posts into the service. I know some people use Twitter as a sort of weird feed reader, and I have no problem pumping a copy of my data into centralized services. As it turns out, there are a number of services out there that will monitor a feed and post the results to services like Twitter. I started out with FeedBurner, but this seemed like overkill as I had no intention of utilizing the other FeedBurner offerings (giving up control of the namespace of your feed is another instance of the craziness associated with the move to a centralized web). After some brief experimentation, I settled on dlvr.it.

This accomplishes everything that I was looking for. All of my blog posts, micro or not, are now on my blog (fancy that). I retain ownership and control of all my data. Everything is archived and searchable. I’m not depending on some fickle, centralized service to shorten the links that I’m trying to share. People who want to follow my updates can subscribe to my feed in their feed reader of choice. My activity can still be followed in Twitter, but I don’t have any active participation in that service.

I’ve found that not attempting to restrain myself to a character limit is like a breath of fresh air. Previously I was able to share links only. There was little-to-no space left over for commentary. Now I can include my thoughts about the link being shared, whether it be a book that I’m reading or a news article that piques my interest. This is more satisfying to me, and I think results in a more meaningful experience for those who are interested in my thoughts.

Since moving to this system, I’ve only launched my Twitter client two or three times. I’ve found that I don’t miss the stream. I never followed too many people on Twitter. Many of those whom I did follow maintain some sort of blog with a feed that I subscribe to. Some don’t. That’s unfortunate, but if your online presence exists solely within a walled garden, I’m ok with not following you.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-09-19

2010-09-19T00:00:00-07:00

Neo-Minimalism and the Rise of the Technomads: http://j.mp/brYDkM #
It's funny because it's true: http://xkcd.com/792/ Don't reuse your passwords, please. #
The Casting Stick: http://j.mp/bQouQj I am certainly making one of these. #
Today I learned that the lower left side of Sylvester Stallone's face is paralyzed. Thank you, Wikipedia. http://j.mp/cuV8KR #
William Gibson on Dangerous Minds: http://j.mp/bsXOgo #
Currently watching Living in the Future: http://j.mp/9qj2aJ #
> @dangerroom: 'Batman' Prepares To Join The Air Force http://bit.ly/9U0ZYj #
> @BFELabs: Anatomy of Shell Garments: The Components - Part Two of our series with Unleashed Tactical Equipment - http://wp.me/pO9RX-aD #
Apparently, this was the worst summer in three decades: http://j.mp/a365vW #
Winter will be colder and wetter than usual, too: http://j.mp/bgvhLc #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-09-12

2010-09-12T00:00:00-07:00

Back from the mountains. #
50 Days in the Olympic Mountains: http://j.mp/ar934O #
> @BFELabs: Anatomy of Shell Garments - An Article Mini-Series in Association w/ Unleashed Tactical Equipment: http://wp.me/pO9RX-ac #
Into the Elwha: http://j.mp/cS3PdQ #
> @ITStactical: Here's my 100 Push-ups for Loosing the Facebook Bet! http://bit.ly/bE0fRf #
Baranof Island Solo Expedition trip report: http://j.mp/bpoWub #
John Vonhof on toe blisters: http://j.mp/9Jbg1u #
Le Loup makes camp: http://j.mp/ceDexm #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-29

2010-08-29T00:00:00-07:00

Watching Adam Lowry at the Do Lectures: http://www.dolectures.com/speakers/speakers-2009/adam-lowry #
Gabriel Branby (of Gransfors Bruks) speaking at Do Lectures: http://www.dolectures.com/speakers/speakers-2009/gabriel-branby #
Seattle climber aims to set speed record on Everest: http://bit.ly/aGzxow #
Watching @avagdu's video from our Glacier Peak Wilderness trip: http://blip.tv/file/4035571 #
> @rantmedia: 'Sean Kennedy: Zombie Hunter' new short mini-film from RantMedia in 1080p: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wQKJEBs1yU #
> @BarefootTed: My Leadville 100 report has posted: http://bit.ly/bft_leadville #
Back from the Goat Rocks Wilderness. #
First Ascent trailer: http://vimeo.com/14436091 #
Sock reviews from Afghanistan: http://j.mp/aYBMX8 #
Wallet Urban Survival Tricks: http://j.mp/btDhYH #
Watching Avagdu's video from our Wild Sky trip: 'Storm The Wire Video - S03E08 - Wild Sky' http://blip.tv/file/4056712 #
Just borrowed a first edition of Harry Franck's A Vagabond Journey Around the World, published 1910. The original vagabond! #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-22

2010-08-22T00:00:00-07:00

Back from guiding a 7 day trip in the Crater Lake National Park backcountry. #
Wilderness Simplicity, Flexibility, and Power: http://bit.ly/cmEp3n #
Rolf Potts' No Baggage Challenge: http://www.rtwblog.com/ #
Watching 'Storm The Wire Video - S03E06 - R4nger5 America' from @avagdu: http://blip.tv/file/4023922 #
I didn't think I'd ever finish reading Lonesome Dove. That was one long, slow book. But worth it. #
I want to put a Ventus Wind Turbine in my pack: http://www.intherabbithole.com/ventus-wind-turbine/ #
Outside the grocery store I met a couple riding a tandem bike from the arctic to Patagonia. #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-08

2010-08-08T00:00:00-07:00

Looking forward to seeing The Wildest Dream in IMAX. http://bit.ly/95evi9 http://bit.ly/cunIcI #
Anton Krupicka's Alpine Binge: http://bit.ly/dDnc78 #
Max Headroom comes to DVD on Aug 10: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00005JNU5 (Blank Reg is my hero) #
More base jumping fun on Baring: http://bit.ly/c15XBl #
Off to Oregon for a bit. #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-01

2010-08-01T00:00:00-07:00

Read about the history of backpacking gear: http://bit.ly/99XoXo Old, well used, and well loved gear is sexy. #
Finished reading The Snow Leapard. Great book. Recommended for anyone who likes mountains. #
I find cleaning my boots to be very satisfying. #
Hendrik's Experiences Going UL: http://bit.ly/cZgU3a #
Tip: In the Hoh rainforest, you're never more than a day's walk from US 101. Just sayin'... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9a0Dw6PM5w #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-18

2010-07-18T00:00:00-07:00

Backpacking in 95F temperatures? Remind me not to do that again. #
The Swakane canyon is on fire: http://bit.ly/arG2PA I hiked it in March. #
Collage: Defeating Censorship with User-Generated Content http://bit.ly/cAJwGK #
Hendrik interviews Eric Hardee from Rivendell Mountain Works: http://bit.ly/bWhiBp Sweet looking packs. And locally made! #
Riding a horse through the Khyber Pass: http://bit.ly/ckVGX7 #
Shoot Your Friends: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx-Q_dQAeFA #
I like the new BBC News redesign. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ #
http://bit.ly/c5WxO5 It's even better on a real bike! Human power all the way. #
Back from Seattle meet with @kevinisageek and @avagdu. Tomorrow: mountains. #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-11

2010-07-11T00:00:00-07:00

Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc #
Ushahidi is an open source crowdsourcing crisis map: http://www.ushahidi.com/ #
Lessons from fashion's free culture: http://bit.ly/d9QJnZ (Copyright kills innovation and squashes profits) #
24 Hour Solo Survival: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWdxKKNFAuY #
The Royal Road to Romance was a fun book. Halliburton was one of the original vagabonds. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1885211538 #
RT @amazonwalkers: Watch "The Botfly Living in Ed Stafford's Head" on Vimeo! http://vimeo.com/13165448 #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-06-27

2010-06-27T00:00:00-07:00

Starting to re-listen to Afternow: Witchhunter Chronicles http://rantmedia.ca/afternow/ #
Chris Townsend's gear for the Pacific Northwest Trail: http://bit.ly/cgp1Fu #
RT @WildLives Simplify Or Die http://bit.ly/agrOuJ #
Happy summer solstice! #
RT @vavrekcom: :: gulf inside story :: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3bzypjTIWg #
The Bug Out Bag and You! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4YC1SxWyY4 #
Flickr's new photo page is great. Bigger photos by default! http://bit.ly/cJUV6l #
RT @vavrekcom: :: how to build a compost bin :: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZlzAq5J6fM #
Watching the Stimulator http://submedia.tv/stimulator/ #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-06-20

2010-06-20T00:00:00-07:00

Ecovillage rap song: http://youtu.be/OJKwm7R8aSs #
Finished reading At Play in the Fields of the Lord. Crazy book. Matthiessen sure can string a sentence together. #
Move your body: http://youtu.be/SKGF-ErsJiI #
The 100 Most Celebrated Travel Books of All Time http://bit.ly/aMCG1K (via @worldhum) #
I like wale shit. http://bit.ly/9vNzMf #
"Too much copyright is detrimental to diversity of cultural expression" http://bit.ly/cB0NuN #
Underground MMA Conditioning: http://bit.ly/bZTxgz #
Wordpress 3.0 is pretty neat: http://bit.ly/9gz7G3 #
HTTPS Everywhere! http://bit.ly/d7v4CY #
Klean Kanteen Sport Cap 2.0 Recall: http://kleankanteen.com/safetynotice/ #
Spent the afternoon playing with a wild duck who came to visit me while I was cleaning my bike. #

Twitter Changes

2010-06-13T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve decided that I don’t like pulling individual tweets into the blog as uniquely styled posts. For now, that behavior has been disabled. I’ve moved to a single weekly aggregate post including all the previous week’s tweets. We’ll see how that goes.

Since individual tweets are no longer being pulled in, I’ve put a list of the most recent tweets down in the footer. Next to that you’ll also find a new list of the week’s most popular posts. Fancy!

A New Look

2010-05-07T00:00:00-07:00

It’s been nearly two years since I last redesigned this site. Don’t let me go that long again! The web is supposed to be a dynamic place, you know. Anyway, here’s the new look.

It isn’t drastically different from the old one. I’m still keeping it clean and simple, and the base colors are the same.

You might notice the rounded corners on some things. Yeah, that’s right. Web 2.0, here I come! I think rounded corners are only acceptable if accomplished with simple CSS. CSS3 is slated to include the border-radius property to achieve rounded corners. The specifications are not yet finalized, but Mozilla browsers have implemented the property with -moz-border-radius and WebKit browsers with -webkit-border-radius. Those are the properties that I’m using. That means you’ll get rounded corners in browsers like Firefox and Safari. Opera seems to work too. Internet Explorer, not so much. (Come on, IE has a hard enough time complying with current standards. You can’t expect it to look to the future!)

If you notice any bugs or would like to suggest any changes, let me know. After all, the site is really for you, dear user.

(I did briefly look at everything on a Windows box running IE8. It seemed to work – other than the rounded corners, of course – but if you notice any bugs in that particular browser, you know the drill.)

Two of the things that really spurred this design are Readability and Clippable. For about a month now, I’ve been using these bookmarklets while reading longs articles online. They help a lot. But it’s really a problem with the design of some sites that I feel the need to use them. I decided that I wanted to redesign my site with typography in mind.

I’m also now integrating Twitter posts into the blog. We’ll see how that goes. They’re styled differently, so there is a visual distinction between a tweet and a normal post. The idea is that I’m now just using twitter as a back-end to create short posts. If I want to, I can switch to some other microblogging service and you, the user, need never know the difference. (I could even just use Wordpress to create short posts! But that might get me kicked off the interwebs…)

Tweets integrated into the blog means tweets in the RSS feed, as well. That makes my RSS mash-up a bit irrelevant. If you currently subscribe to that, I’d recommend changing your subscription back to the normal feed. For those who don’t want to change, I’ve removed the Twitter feed from the mash-up’s input. That way you won’t have to read each of my tweets twice. The mash-up feed will now only include the blog and Flickr stream.

Blueprint

This design is built upon the Blueprint CSS framework. I’ve used it a handful of times before, but never properly. My method was always to link to the three Blueprint CSS files (screen.css, print.css, and ie.css) in the header and then toss in a link to my own stylesheet underneath them. I never used the compressor.

The idea behind the compressor is pretty simple. It allows you to maintain one central instance of Blueprint and use that to generate the CSS needed for each individual project.

The author’s walk through outlines the general idea:

    <ul>
    <li>Keep a core Blueprint folder checked out with <a href="http://git-scm.com/">Git</a> on your computer</li>
        <li>Create a settings.yml file within the Blueprint folder with all the specifics of each project using Blueprint</li>
        <li>Use the command line to generate <span class="caps">CSS</span> for a project on command
    <ul>
    <li>Incorporating any site-specific attributes
    <ul>
    <li>Namespace on all Blueprint classes</li>
        <li>Custom grid template rather than the standard 24 columns / 30px column width / 10px gutter width</li>
    </ul>
    </li>
        <li>Compressing any custom <span class="caps">CSS</span> and appending to the end of the Blueprint stylesheets</li>
        <li>Appending custom semantic selectors to the end of the Blueprint stylesheets</li>
    </ul></li>
    </ul>

When I first head about this, I though that the compression bit was all well and good, but I’ve never been really adamant about optimizing CSS for speed in the first place. I’m more concerned about compliance with standards and readability. Maintaining a central Blueprint instance didn’t appeal to me much, either. What really stood out is the ability to have custom semantic selectors.

CSS frameworks are neat. I’ve used a handful. Like any other tool, they’re not always appropriate. When they are, they have certain advantages and disadvantages. One of the main things that I dislike about them is that they encourage you to clutter your code with framework-specific junk. If you’re using 960.gs you’re going to have elements with classes like “container_x”, “grid_x”, “omega”, and “suffix_x” all over the place. With Grids you’ll have “yui-g”, “yui-b”, “yui-main”, and the like. Readability of code is diminished and you’ll probably end up suffering from a case of div-itis. Not to mention, you can forget about a strict separation of markup and styling. Sure, you could copy the style definitions for the specific framework classes into the classes or IDs of your own elements, but how many folks actually take the time to do all that copying and pasting? I sure don’t! The appeal in a CSS framework is to save time, not make the process of building a site longer. Plus, there’s an appeal in having the framework-related styling separate from the normal site styling. Such a separation makes the framework easy to update.

This is where Blueprint’s semantic classes comes in. It allows you to tell Blueprint to take one of your classes (or IDs) and apply to it the properties of one of Blueprint’s classes. A-mazing.

As an example, the header of this page might look something like this if built on Blueprint without the compressor:

pig-monkey.com

Blah blah blah...

Look at those framework-specific classes all over the place. Nasty. But in the Blueprint compressor settings file, I can define some semantic classes.

"#top, h1#title" : "span-24 last"
"#top #nav" : "span-18 prepend-1"
"#top form#search" : "span-5 last"
"#description" : "span-23 prepend-1 last"
"#flickr" : "span-20 append-2 prepend-1 last"

Now my markup looks like this:

pig-monkey.com

Blah blah blah...

Clean as a whistle! No useless divs, all elements semantically named, and not dependent on any framework.

As great as the compressor is, I do have a couple problems with it. When using the compressor, Blueprint intends that you only have 3 final (compressed) stylesheets: screen.css, print.css, and ie.css. Wordpress, of course, requires a style.css file to define the template. That’s no problem. I just a create a style.css file that has the theme information in it and then toss in a @import url(‘blueprint/screen.css’). Then in the Wordpress header I can put a link to style.css, print.css, and ie.css. Everybody’s happy.

Styling a website basically boils down to making a small change to the stylesheet and refreshing the page to see how that looks. Running the compressor after each change to combine the custom stylesheet with the screen.css file is not productive. So for the development process I tossed a @import url(‘blueprint/custom.css’) into the main style.css file. That works fine.

Then I finish building the theme. I’m ready to compress the stylesheets, so I remove the call to the custom stylesheet in style.css. I tell the compressor where the custom stylesheet is and have it combine it with the screen.css file. I run the compressor, reload the site, and everything explodes.

Just when I thought I was done!

The problem is that in the stylesheet the compressor generates, it puts my custom styles above the semantic classes. Throughout the development process, I was calling the screen.css file (which includes the semantic classes) before the custom stylesheet. As you no doubt know, stylesheets cascade. You can’t just switch up the order of elements without breaking stuff.

Oh well, I thought. At this point I was tired working on the site and didn’t care enough to fight it. I just put the line to call the custom sheet back in style.css after Blueprint’s screen.css file. I still feel like the whole semantic classes bit is enough of a reason to use the compressor, even if I’m not actually compressing my main stylesheet!

RSS Mash-Up

2009-10-01T00:00:00-07:00

This mash-up feed still exists, but you probably don't want to use it. As of May 2010, Twitter feeds are now integrated into the blog and thus are included in the normal feed. The mash-up feed now only mashes the blog feed and Flickr photos

When I first decided to add twitter posts to my site, I debated whether I would rather have them integrated into the actual blog posts or separated. Visually, I like to have the separation, but I always thought it would be neat to pull the twitter posts directly into Wordpress’ database, and so have them integrated into my RSS feed. Otherwise, for those who wish to follow my twitter posts, but are not on twitter, they have to subscribe to two different feeds – both my blog feed and twitter feed.

Today, I had the idea of keeping the actual separation of twitter and the blog, but simply creating a new RSS feed using some sort of RSS-mash-up-aggregator thingy. I thought Feedburner could do something like that, but apparently not. After searching around for other options and not finding anything that really excited me, I decided to just use Yahoo Pipes. After all, this is pretty much what it was made for.

Combining feeds in Pipes is pretty simple, but after mashing them together, I discovered that twitter’s RSS feed is kinda ugly. Luckily, editing feeds using regular expressions in Pipes is pretty simple, too. After polishing up the twitter feed a bit, I thought Why not toss my Flickr feed into this puppy? But occasionally I’ll upload a large group of photos to Flickr at a single time, and I didn’t want to totally bomb my new RSS feed. Plus, most of the time when I put photos on Flickr, I create an accompanying blog post, so I wasn’t sure that adding the Flickr feed to the mash-up was even necessary. I figured that I’d toss in the Flickr feed for now, but compromise by having Pipes truncate it to the 6 most recent items.

Now I have a pretty new feed.

Then came the problem of what to do with it. I didn’t want to just toss up a link somewhere. I preferred the idea of replacing my normal blog feed with this new super-feed. But I also didn’t want to just edit the Wordpress template header. I new Feedburner had a plugin to integrate with Wordpress, so I thought about burning the new feed and then using the Feedburner plugin to pull it in, but that seemed a little excessive, particular since I don’t care about any of the click-tracking or monetizing features of Feedburner. Then I found the Feed Locations plugin, which does exactly what I wanted: allow me to specify the location of my feed in the Wordpress admin panel.

Now, if you ask Wordpress for this site’s RSS feed, you get the new feed. If you’re opposed to all this new fanciness and just want the plain old blog feed, it’s still up at the same location, just not linked to from anywhere.

Let me know what you think about having the Flickr photos in the feed. If it’s redundant, I’ll take them out.

Beautifying

2008-06-10T00:00:00-07:00

Another redesign! This one only 6 months from the last. How remarkable is that?

The base template and heavy CSS of the last design made this change relatively simple. This time around, I’m using YUI Reset and YUI Fonts. I started using both of them a month or two ago on a couple other sites. It’s hard to imagine building a site without them now. They take a lot of headaches out of CSS.

This design is not using YUI Grids. I have used it before, but I don’t think it offers any benefit with this kind of design. It’s more suited toward a content intensive site with many nested divisions. Something like Yahoo’s front page.

You’ll also notice a Twitter feed on the top of the index page. I’ve been trying to figure out what the appeal of Twitter is, but so far, it’s escaped me. I figured embedding tweets on the site would provide extra encouragement for me to try it out. I think Twitter may lend itself to my summer on the road, too. So, we’ll see how long that lasts. It seems to be noticeably slow, so I might have to find another way to pull the data.

Another new feature is tags. I started tagging posts a while ago, but haven’t displayed them till now. The majority of posts are not tagged. Maybe someday I’ll go back and tag the 1,300 old posts – but I doubt it.

Some kinks of the design are still being worked out, but if you notice anything strange – whether it be from the redesign, server move, or mail move – let me know.