If you follow me on Twitter, you noticed that I recently bought a home and that I was confused about the date of BlogIndiana. I’m happy to say that our move-in date and the blog conference are on separate weekends, so now you don’t have to help me move (you were planning on it right?). You can go to BlogIndiana at the IUPUI Campus Center on August 16th and 17th.

If you use Alex King’s Twitter Tools (version: 1.1b1), you will want to make the following two changes to his code. The first one will make your tweet-post URLs and title more beautiful and SEO friendly by not splitting words at the end. The second one will remove reply tweets (‘@username’) from becoming posts in your blog, so that half-conversations do not get recorded.

In Alex King’s purpose, Twitter Tools is an archiving tool that saves tweets into his blog. If you use version: 1.2b1, then Twitter Tools can hide reply tweets (those beginning with ‘@’) from displaying in the Twitter Tools sidebar widget, but it will still save every tweet as a blog post. In my purpose of Twitter Tools, I do not want to save (and thus post) tweets that begin with ‘@.’ Therefore you will still need to add the additions to the do_tweet_post function below. If you do not, all tweets will end up in your RSS feed as blog posts.

Let’s not mince words here

If you link your tweets and publish them in your RSS feed, you may have noticed that Twitter Tools trims tweets at 30 characters and usually cuts off a title mid-word. It would be better to index to the previous space and trim the post-slug there. Replacing the code of the function, trim_add_elipsis (at about line 1030 in twitter-tools.php, before function ak_gmmktime()) with the code that follows will do this:

if (!function_exists('trim_add_elipsis')) {
// smjdesign edit begin - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
function trim_add_elipsis($string, $limit = 100) {
// shorten string
$string = substr($string, 0, $limit);
//find last space character
$max_char_pos = strrpos($string, ' ');
// shorten to last space and add ellipsis
if ($max_char_pos > 0)    { $string = substr($string, 0, $max_char_pos)."..."; }
return $string;
}
// smjdesign edit end - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

As a bonus, I’ll tell you were you can change the length of the title, too. It’s around line 205 within the do_tweet_post function. Look for a ’30′ at the end of a line containing “trim_add_elipsis” Change the ’30′ to something larger, for instance 40 or 50.

When indirect communication is preferred

UPDATE: Alex has made ignoring reply tweets (beginning with ‘@’) a standard option within Twitter Tools. However, I still recommend changing the trim size as I mention above.

I can’t imagine using Twitter Tools without the following change. If not made, one will be listing half conversations in their blog. In order to ignore direct tweets (or more specifically tweets that start with ‘@’), edit the following code at the end of the do_tweet_post function (at about line 215 in twitter-tools.php):

function do_tweet_post($tweet) {
global $wpdb;
remove_action('publish_post', 'aktt_notify_twitter');
$data = array(
'post_content' => $wpdb->escape(aktt_make_clickable($tweet->tw_text))
// smjdesign edit begin - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
, 'post_title' => $wpdb->escape(trim_add_elipsis($tweet->tw_text, 40))
// smjdesign edit end - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
, 'post_date' => get_date_from_gmt(date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $tweet->tw_created_at))
, 'post_category' => array($this->blog_post_category)
, 'post_status' => 'publish'
, 'post_author' => $wpdb->escape($this->blog_post_author)
);
// smjdesign edit begin - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
if(substr($data["post_content"], 0, 1) != '@') {
$post_id = wp_insert_post($data);
add_post_meta($post_id, 'aktt_twitter_id', $tweet->tw_id, true);
wp_set_post_tags($post_id, $this->blog_post_tags);
}
// smjdesign edit end - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
add_action('publish_post', 'aktt_notify_twitter');
}

As always, you can email me from the contact page and ask me for the entire PHP file if you do not feel comfortable editing the file yourself.

So I’m in the market for a new PC and I actually thought about an Apple, but once I realized the options (or lack of), I didn’t look back and bought parts for a PC.

There are only 3 models of Mac: Mini ($500+), iMac ($1500+), MacPro($2500+). I am a media designer, and I will need 1GB+ to run Photoshop, Flash, and Illustrator at the same time. The only one that can do that (that also doesn’t require buying a monitor) is the MacPro which costs five times as much as I’m making my new PC for. I’m only buying a motherboard, 2GB of memory, a mATX case/power supply, and an AM2 processor for $500 from Newegg.com, since I already have hard disks and 2 DVD drives and an LCD monitor.

I know that building a PC from scratch is nothing compared to listening to the OS-X installation background music , but I’m sure I could get a Dell with enough processing power and upgrade the memory for $150. And anyway why would I need 4 Xeon processors (Mac Pro) if I’m not editing video? My work’s dual G5′s are fine. I think Apple just wants a pretty profit margin for their top of line system–one that I’m not willing to fill with my money.

Sorry, Steve, you need more options.

–Stephen M. James
www.smjdesign.com

FC: Scenes from the Culture Clash

Excerpt:
“They are the traumatized bosses, as well as the 47-year-old woman from HR who has been hassled time and again by her youngest workers and their parents.”

–Stephen M. James
www.smjdesign.com

I’m still not sure why people STILL go to movie rental stores and pay $4 per movie. Maybe it’s because they are impulsive. Maybe it’s because they’ve only bought books online from Amazon.

If you are listening, NetFlix make one’s RSS of their Queue public–optionally, of course. Why? Because I ONLY watch cool movies.

Tonight’s readings/watching:

Security Now! 24: Questions and Answers

I, Cringely – Google’s Grand Plan to Take Over TV Advertising

I, Cringely – How Pay-Per-Click Is Killing the Traditional Publishing Industry (death to magazines by mail!)

I, Cringely – The Falafel Connection (NSA wiretaps explained–it’s based on data mining)

After Words: Ambassador L. Paul Bremer interviewed by James Hoagland

Afternote: I had to reinstall Apple Motion 2.0 last week in order to get it to work. Readers, if you are keeping track, that’s the third time in two months.

–Stephen M. James
www.smjdesign.com