This could’a, should’a, would’a been a great blog post.
March 1981: Shakin’ Stevens was top of the charts, Tom Baker was leaving Doctor Who and Clive Sinclair was bringing computers to the masses. Britain was moving into a new age, and one object above all would herald its coming.
If you’re at all interested in public speaking, this is a great insight by Lara into what it’s like on the day of a talk.
Primer, but Twitter.
There’s something quite lovely about this: pairs of tweets that are anagrams of one another.
A little piece of JavaScript to strip out the styling from Twitter widgets.
Oh, no! How horrid! Now Twitter won’t control the “user experience” of that widget!
Instead, the person who actually posted the tweets in the first place gets to decide how they should be displayed. Crazy idea, isn’t it?
I need to get Matt to an Indie Web Camp.
A cute little read-only Twitter client from James that only displays fully-formed tweets: no hashtags, no @-replies.
Lance Arthur uses a tweet from Paul Ford as a starting point for a text adventure.
Strangers on a train.
Kellan explains the tech behind Old Tweets …and also the thinking behind it:
I think our history is what makes us human, and the push to ephemerality and disposability “as a feature” is misguided. And a key piece of our personal histories is becoming “the story we want to remember”, aka what we’ve shared.
A public service from Kellan: the ability to search through your oldest tweets.
A fun bit of Markov chaining of your tweets. Some of mine:
Had a burrito in Barcelona. Thank you get the peacocks plumage.
Stand by to the most helpful. The Fuck Was That type shop and David Byrne walked into a Wikipedia entry?
Last Waltz again. This Is A demonstration of The office doors are they talk right now. Cool your plans.
Picking salad leaves from the people who own them. They’re just resting” at the communal testing lab is!
Heading out the standard option. Alas, there’s no signs of spending Bloomsday as constructive feedback?
Algorithmically-generated combinations of tweets in iambic pentameter. Some of the results are really quite lovely. I’m imagining a poetry reading of this stuff in a hip café …it would be fun.
A very pretty visualisation of tweets on a map using canvas.