Tag Archives: suggestion

Idea: A tool to make it easy to subscribe to web-based lists of Twitter accounts

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Here’s an idea: a tool (which could be web based, or a browser plug in, or a mobile app; or a feature added to existing Twitter clients such as TweetDeck), which would take the URL of a page with a list of links to people’s Twitter profiles, like the one at http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/twitter, which I set up and maintained in a previous career,

Part of Birmingham City Council's list of Twitter accounts, showing those of parks' rangers

and either subscribe the operator to them all, or do that and then create a Twitter list containing them all.

Optionally, it could first present a checklist, from which individual accounts could be selected, or removed.

Would someone like to make this happen?

Improving the already excellent ‘Twitter Blackbird Pie’ WordPress plugin

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I’ve just started using the “” plugin to embed tweets into WordPress posts (I use the self-hosted wordpress.org package). You can see an example below:

[blackbirdpie id=”66835851316957185″]

It’s fantastic — no more taking screen captures, cropping and uploading; or faffing about manually constructing links. All I have to do is include the magic code [blackbirdpie id="66835851316957185"] with the ID of the tweet (in the above example, taken from http://twitter.com/pigsonthewing/status/66835851316957185) as the id parameter value.

However, there are a few ways in which the plugin could be improved.

hCard microformat

Firstly, add an to emit details of the cited tweeter as metadata, by changing, for example (inline styles omitted for clarity):

<div><a href="http://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=pigsonthewing">@pigsonthewing</a><div>Andy Mabbett</div></div>

to:

<div class="vcard"><a class="nickname url" href="http://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=pigsonthewing">@pigsonthewing</a><div class="fn">Andy Mabbett</div></div>

with the addition of three class attributes: “vcard”; “nickname URL” and “fn”.

Citation

Next, instead of wrapping the contents of the tweet in a span, wrap it in a semantically-appropriate blockquote element, by changing:

<span>Blogging about a Blackbird.</span>

to:

<blockquote cite="http://twitter.com/pigsonthewing/status/66835851316957185">Blogging about a Blackbird.</blockquote>

and styling to maintain the current visual presentation.

Separating links

When viewed with CSS disabled, the tweet’s actions (“Reply”, “Retweet”, “Favorite”) run into each other.

Screenshot showing links with no spacing, when CSS is disabled

To improve accessibility and usability, either add white space between them, or, better, mark them up as a list, styled to display in-line, unbulletted, again looking like they do at present.

White space

There is more white space above then below the embedded tweet, above. A little more padding below it would improve readability.

COinS

Finally, consider adding COinS mark-up, so that details of the cited tweet are emitted as metadata.

Invitation

I hope the authors of the plug-in, Themergency.com, will appreciate and act on these suggestions. I’ll be inviting them to read and comment on this post. And I’ll be happy to help with developing any of the ideas suggested above.