Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Taming the tweeter

Image: Frank-the-mouse, rendered so that every hair of his fur is visible, feeds a handful of grains to a bird slightly larger than himself, whose plumage resembles that of the Twitter bird.

Some of you have noticed that I've created a Twitter account. It's really nothing too elaborate; I mainly made it to be able to reply to tweets (up to now, I've been following several accounts by searching for the username every odd day). I did set up two "services": a "quote of the day" and a "twitter feed"

Quote of the day

One of the things I love about quotes is that they can express what you're thinking while blaming someone else for the idea, so over the past few months, whenever I use a quote I try to remember it or write it down. Since I knew I wouldn't be able to check (let alone post to) my twitter account every week, I thought it would be adequate for these quotes to go up automatically.

A friend told me about CoTweet: A service that lets you schedule when tweets will go up. After getting around some inconveniences it has when handling quotation marks, I managed to put all the quotes I could think of on a schedule.

Although the idea is a "quote of the day", the quotes are not, actually, daily. By putting three quotes a week, I was able to stretch the few I could think of to the end of May. The decision then was when in the week they would go up.

Fridays were discounted because Twitter is inherently unusable then, as were Mondays because people usually go to bed late Sundays. The quotes, thus, go up on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, at 12:30 AM

Twitter Feed

The second thing I set up was a Twitter Feed using, of course, TwitterFeed.com. This uses the RSS feed generated by my Blog to post a Tweet when I make a new post; all I had to do was provide my Twitter account and my blog's address.

Okay, so maybe it is somewhat elaborate.

1 comment:

  1. You're lucky the Twitter bird isn't a bird of prey, or he may be eyeing you even more suspiciously.

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