As many of you are aware, I am a frequent Tweeter and regularly distribute Web Developer technology related links for .NET and jQuery via my Tech Tweets.
Historically, my main concern was to just gather the latest web dev news and Tech Tweet those out to the public.
However, more and more many of these posts are just round-ups of other posts with little or no commentary. These posts tend to clutter the interwebs with noise that makes it difficult to find the real gems of web development.Ā
I put out an informal poll on Twitter and here were the resultsā¦
The funny thing is that most of the responses were either in total support of the posts or in total opposition to the posts.
So what now? That is a good question. Iām not sure if you have noticed, but I have dramatically decreased the amount of round-up posts that I tweet.
If a blog post matches one or more of the following criteria it is most likely not going to be tech tweeted anymoreā¦
The title of the blog post starts with a number (example: āTop 10 jQuery Plug-inā¦ā)
If the blog post contains a series of screenshots from other websites without any original content
Over the past couple of weeks I have been saving jQuery posts that Iāve not tweeted matching the above criteria. Thus far I have 22 rejected blog posts!
For those of you who voted that you liked the round-up posts, I still plan to post those blog posts, but only those that are of the highest quality and hopefully provide some sort of original content such as sample code, pros & cons, personal thoughts, etcā¦
My goal is to aid the jQuery community, not work against it ;)
Note: If you have any feedback about the above post or how I can improve Tech Tweets, please let me know.
To end off the year, I thought Iād generate a quick Tweet Cloud that represents my top word usage on Twitter.
I think the above image pretty much sums up my presence on Twitter ;) As if you didnāt know before, I mostly tweet about ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, and general Web Dev related topics.
The above graph was generated by TweetStats and then passed through a service called Wordle.
Note: You can also generate Twitter Clouds using the TweetCloud service, but I found that it wasnāt as accurate at the TweetStats service that I used above. For example, TweetCloud didnāt list ASP.NET MVC as one of my top Twitter words, whereas TweetStats did. Maybe TweetCloud doesnāt account for hashtags?
I get a lot of questions about how I go about finding and distributing my Tech Tweets on a day to day basis. Some people even have the notion that I just sit at my computer and tweet all day.
I thought Iād put together some of these questions and answer them for you. The process is ongoing and regular changes, but the following will capture what I am doing today.
Before we start going into the logistics of what I use and how I use it, I thought Iād first give you a quick overview of why I started tech tweets and why I continue to provide them.
So, without further ado, here are the questionsā¦
1. Why did you start doing Tech Tweets?
Iāve always been a sucker for the latest and greatest technologies. Not only do I enjoy finding out about the latest news and tools, but I also enjoy learning more about my current craft and becoming a better programmer. For these reasons, I regularly sorted through a wide variety of RSS feeds looking for whatās new.
At first, I just kept those links to myself and tried to build my craft. As time progressed I thought my teammates at work might benefit from the links Iāve found as well.
Shortly after, I became aware of Twitter where I was able to take a peak into the minds of those that I admire (in the programming world). Then I figured maybe someone outside of my team might benefit from the links, so I started tweeting them. At first I thought it would also be helpful for me to search for my old tweets, but I later found out that the Twitter search doesnāt go back all that far (in my case like 3 weeks).
2. How do you find all the information for you Tech Tweets?
I use a variety of tools to help round up the latest Tech Tweets. One of my main tools happens to by my iPhone. While I am out, I often get on Tweetie and search Twitter for jQuery and ASP.NET MVC related information. When I find an interesting article, I will post the tweet to Instapaper. A long time ago I used to favorite tweets, but I like the concept of marking Instapaper entries as read (kind of like you do in e-mail). So, Tweetie is one of the iPhone Twitter apps that has integration with Instapaper.
Once I get access to my main computer, then I move on to Google Reader to check my daily RSS feeds (of which I currently have 227 subscriptions even after removing quite a few of them last week). If you donāt have it already, there is an awesome extension for Google Reader (Google Reader Plus for Google Chrome or Google Reader Filter for Firefoxās GreaseMonkey) that will allow you to filter your feeds via Regular Expressions. You can list RegEx patterns that you like and RegEx patterns that you donāt like. The one you like will be highlighted in yellow and the ones you donāt like will be grayed out. You can also set some other options like remove duplicates!
3. What tools do you use to distribute your Tech Tweets?
I would say that this area is the one that I change most frequently, but as of now I start by using a bookmarklet called BigTweet to capture my Tech Tweets. The bookmarklet overlays an inline modal onto the webpage you are on and captures the title of the page, auto shortens the URL using j.mp (formerly bit.ly), and it even can auto post to delicious if you want. There are many other features as well so I recommend you check it out.
So, instead of posting directly from BigTweet to Twitter, I copy/paste the results into HootSuite where I schedule the tech tweet to send out at a future time. I have used many scheduling Twitter clients in the past such as Twuffer, TwitterMatic!, FutureTweets, TwtMstr, Social Oomph (formerly known as Tweet Later), but Iāve found that HootSuite has given me the nicest UI, the richest features, with consistent results. And now recently they have released an iPhone version that uses the same settings you have in the browser version! The one thing that I resist from HootSuite is their URL shortener. I used it for a little while, but soon found out that people didnāt like the digg like bar at the top of each tech tweet I sent out ;)
After the tech tweets have gone out for the day, I use Window Live Writer (WLW) to post a daily Tech Tweet round-up. I wrote a plug-in for WLW to gather my Tweets from today, group them into categories, parse them with a Regular Expression, expand the URLs, submit the Tech Tweets to my delicious account for future searching, and then generate the HTML for the Tech Tweet blog post.
Conclusion
You might have noticed that I have slightly changed my approval process over the last week or two. I am trying to refine my process to keep the highest quality links as possible and cut out the noise. I plan to do a separate post on my thoughts about this later.
I hope you have enjoyed the Tech Tweets and I plan to continue to provide helpful, timely, and high quality links on a day to day basis.
If you have any suggestions on how I can better contribute to the community through Tech Tweets please let me know. I value your input!
You might be wondering āWhere Did @elijahmanorās Tech Tweets Go?ā. I actually wasnāt aware of this issue until I had several people asking where my tech tweets went. It seems that there is an issue with my account on Twitter today starting around 9AM CST.
In order to see my tweets there is a workaround of unfollowing and then refollowing me (@elijahmanor). This seems strange, but it has worked for those that have tried it.
You may have not noticed that this was a problem. If that is the case then maybe you were seeing my tweets as part of a Twitter search (which still works) or maybe I was part of a custom Twitter List that you are watching.
I hope that this is just a temporary glitch in Twitter that will resolve itself soon. I have created a Twitter Ticket explaining the issue just in case.
I will do my regular Tech Tweets blog post round-up as usual. So, if you didnāt see any of my tech tweets you can enjoy them there :)
Update: On my way home today I noticed an update to the Twitter Status Blog stated that
We are aware of and investigating the causes of timeline delays and missing tweets. Retweet is back up and fully functional.
So, I hope that means this will not last for long ;)
Since my last post I wondering if there was a better way to visualize my tweets. The Word Cloud was a nice feature, but I wanted more. I thought about using the Google Annotated Time Line chart, but it didnāt quite give me what I was looking for. Well, it turns out there is a really cool JavaScript plug-in called Simile Timeline that provides the functionality I was looking for.
So, I threw the following together to display my tweets. After completing it, I realized how much I actually tweet! A lot of exciting stuff was going on after being on vacation, having PDC 2009 going on, and watching the jQuery Summit.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
Visualize your Twitter Timiline with jQuery and SIMILE
Visualize your Twitter Timeline with jQuery and SIMILE
