Yearly Archives: 2009

My continuing experiences and thoughts concerning Twitter, Twitpic, and Audiotwit.

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After a few more days of using Twitter, I decided to try Twitpic and Audiotwit that I had noticed others using.

Twitpic

This just seems to be a basic service for storing and commenting on images that sends out a tweet when you add a new photograph or comment on one. It has no provisions for creating albums or anything like that. Since I have my own photo gallery, I have no real need to use this as a place to store images. Same reason I don’t store images at my MySpace page or using something like Flickr. I will admit that the main page that shows where new images are coming from is kind of cool. I did upload one picture and here’s my twitpic page.

Audiotwit

To use this relatively new service, it appears, you send a reply tweet to @listensto with the artist and song title of what you are listening to.  An example tweet would be “@listensto Metallica – One“. Then, it creates an Audiotwit page for you at (username).audiotwit.com.  In my case this was mrheadrick.audiotwit.com. It then adds a Lyrics link next to the song to look-up the song’s lyrics.

Winamp Now PlayingSince I was using the Winamp Now Playing Plug-In version 2.1.2 together with a PHP script I wrote to generate now-playing images and a song history on my entertainment page, I wondered if there was a Winamp Twitter plug-in and there was one to my amazement. While it did work, it had problems dealing with some characters, such as “&” where it would just chop-off everything after the “&”.  The RSS feed of the audiotwit page is also a bit buggy.  “&” causes problems with the feed and the feed itself does not validate with Feedvalidator.org.  During all this testing, I decided I better create another twitter account just for this purpose and keep all the “now listening to” spam out of my main twitter account.  (Update 8/11/2010: @mrheadrick_np was the account I made at the time; however, it got flagged to not show in searches and hasn’t been used in months and has been deleted. The audiotwit page at mrheadrick_np.audiotwit.com still exists for the time being.)

During this time I had also discovered that many others used the phrase “listening to” to announce what they were listening to. There’s even a search link at the Twitter search results page for this phrase. At this point I decided to stop using the Winamp Twitter plug-in which was a bit limiting and use my Winamp PHP script to send a tweet via the Twitter API using both “@listensto” and “listening to” methods.  After some searching around, I used the improved script by Scott Sloan I found here and adapted it to my own needs.

So now, mrheadrick_np.audiotwit.com and this “listening to” search will show what I am playing. The feed you see in my blog is the feed that the “listening to” search produces, which does not have problems with “&” and other characters being in the artist and song titles.

Twitter

I also added a Twitter widget to my main website. I used the HTML version and modified the CSS to create the appearance I wanted.

Having done all this, does anyone else really care what I’m doing or have been up to or what the most recent songs I’ve listened to are? Beyond family and close friends (most of which do not use Twitter), there might be a few, such as those from Surmunity, but I suspect most could care less. Several of the people that are following me on Twitter I think are doing so more to increase their own page ranks and points of entry for the various search bots to find their websites and content than to really follow what I am doing or saying. Some strangers that follow me, especially those with goobldygook usernames, are clearly doing so for spamming purposes. These I block when I come across them and many of these type of accounts are usually suspended by Twitter. Even so, I still think Twitter is kind of cool. 🙂

I am trying Twitter out.

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Well, I’ve decided to try the Twitter thing out with my profile page at http://twitter.com/mrheadrick. I was tempted by some threads at my webhost and CNN Newsroom where Rick Sanchez has his Twitter board. What can I say, my TV seems to be tuned to CNN when there’s not something else I’d rather be watching.

Time will tell how much I really use it and if it eventually goes the way of my ICQ, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and who knows what other instant messenger type programs I’ve used and now no longer do, or at least very rarely.  It’s almost annoying how many of these instant messenger and social networking things there are around.  Probably why things like Pidgin are often used so you only have to use one program to connect and send messages to users via a variety of messaging protocols. I will admit that Twitter is a little different from your typical instant messenger service and MySpace type community.

So far I can’t say that I’m pleased with Twitter’s support. I have an open request that’s been sitting there for 5 days now without having even been assigned to anyone. The request is irrelevant now so I’ve just told them to close it. I was wanting them to confirm that MarkRH was actually taken since I was not able to create it as it said it already existed but there’s no Twitter URL for it nor does a search show that username. Oh well, what can you expect? It’s free.

I am trying out a Firefox plug-in called TwitterFox which seems to work pretty well and doesn’t consume extra screen space or require the need to always have a Twitter tab open; although, I seem to anyway LOL. I did manage to stumble onto the public Twitter timeline which shows what everyone is saying or doing.  It’s kind of interesting to check that out every now and then. If I make another post about Twitter I’ll create a category for it most likely.

All this reminds me of what my dad says to mom all the time: “What’s the word bird?”, to which she responds: “Tweet” LOL. 🙂

Four movies added to DVD collection and music video modifications.

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Along with The Dark Knight, I also got the following four movies for Christmas:

As I’ve been doing lately, both the front DVD cover and trailer are included.  Concerning the trailers, I have started adding &fmt=18 to the URL of YouTube videos to download a higher quality video in MP4 format.  I learned of this trick here.  These videos will still play fine in the flash player.

On my Entertainment page, I have corrected a problem that I noticed with the music videos.  It seems that many were removed due to copyright/compensation disputes between YouTube(Google) and Warner Music Group and as such I have had to replace them with alternate videos of the same songs I found on YouTube.  Who knows if they’ll remain or not 😕 .  Do a search on Google for more articles concerning the issue.  Dumb. All they are doing is shooting themselves in the foot.  There are several artists whose music I would have never bought (Bond and Vanessa-Mae as two examples), if I had not stumbled across their music on YouTube and other sources.