Of Twitter, part 2

You’ll notice I put a little Twitter widget in the sidebar.  I know I said before that I didn’t see much practical use in Twitter.  I also said that their public API is useful because it allows people to come up with their own unique ways to use it.  That’s more or less what happened here.

I’ve been trying for a while to find a good way to have a bookmarks feed on my site.  At first I used del.icio.us, but they used Javascript to parse the feed… and to display the contents.  I’m staunchly opposed to using Javascript for anything important, because disabling Javascript would then disable that important bit of content or style.  I had tried and had problems with Magpie RSS (an RSS parser written in PHP), and also with Wordpress’s blogroll feature (if only I could sort the links chronologically…)  Luckily, in a recent blog post Jeffrey Zeldman linked to Alex King’s Twitter Tools, which uses that cool Twitter API to send updates to your blog.  I installed it, and, when it wasn’t working the way I wanted it to, dove into the PHP and hacked it up a bit.

So here they are: my Twitter updates.  I’ll end up using it more for bookmarking than for microblogging, so it’ll end up being more of a del.icio.us type thing than a Twitter type thing.  This way, though, I can be sneaky and throw in a microblog post when I’m feeling sneaky.