Category Archives: Social Media

TwitterScope: Follow the Rest of the Twitter Conversation

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TwitterScope will display Twitter posts from a specified user and all @replies to that user. Having all the posts on a single page makes it much easier to follow the rest of the conversation if it involves people you’re not yet following.

Twitter makes it easy to follow updates posted friends, colleagues and people you find interesting, but it can sometimes be difficult to make sense of these posts when the person is replying to someone you aren’t yet following. It can be even more confusing if they’re replying a number of different people at once.

I often found myself wanting to read all of the posts that are part of a Twitter discussion, just like on a message board, and ideally without having to do a lot of extra clicking to do it. Since I couldn’t find any 3rd party apps that did this, I decided to write one myself.
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New Twitter Design and CSS Customization

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Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

Twitter has updated with a new design that’s mostly cosmetic changes – the most noticeable of which is that the tabs at the top of the timeline have been moved to the right-hand sidebar. This makes room for new tabs which will introduced sometime in the near future.

However, what I found most interesting about the updated design wasn’t the visual differences. There is also one important coding change: each tweet now has html you can use to identify it and control it’s formatting with CSS.
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Twitterbook v3 Now Available

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A new version of Twitterbook is now available – the mashup that lets you use your Facebook status to update your Twitter account.  For this update, a special thanks goes out to Ryan for his suggestions on handling long Facebook status updates when submitting them to Twitter.

Download Twitterbook v3 (4KB)

Just like the previous versions of Twitterbook, you’ll need to edit the .php file with your personal information before uploading it to your server. On the new Facebook layout, you can find the link for the RSS feed for your status updates here:

http://www.new.facebook.com/minifeed.php?filter=11

You’ll need the actual URL of your feed (found at the link above) to properly setup the twitterbook.php file, along with the URL for your Twitter Feed, your Facebook Name (eg. ‘Stuart’), as well as your Twitter username and password.

Once you’ve edited and saved the twitterbook file and posted it on a web server running PHP, just go to the URL for the script (or call it using an automated Chron task) anytime you want to update your Twitter account with your Facebook status.

Thanks again for the feedback and suggestions!  Post a comment, or connect with me on Twitter: twitter.com/designmeme

CSS Facelift for Facebook – Part 1

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UPDATE: These techniques will no longer allow you to customize your Facebook profile.

Facebook now has over 24 million active users keeping in touch with friends and colleagues. Some people are predicting that it will become the de-facto social networking tool for the web. It’s certainly a very useful service, but as I spent more time with Facebook looking at all those identically designed profile pages I started to miss the individuality that accompanied personal websites and blogs.

Let’s look at how you can take a Faceook profile and using a bit of CSS and the new Facebook Markup Language, create something a bit more personalized. In Part 1 we’ll look at how to start adding your own xHTML and CSS.
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