4th May, 2010
Twitter just launched a little tool designed to make it easier to embed tweets into your website. Currently blogs tend to paste in tweets whenever a twitter source requires reference, as Twitter explain in their blog post “…a pasted-in image of a tweet is a bit of a hack. We have a simple alternative to propose…”
All you have to do, in theory, is load up Twitter’s “Blackbird Pie” tool, enter a “full tweet URL” and voila, neat little embedded tag.
Unfortunately, the HTML code it currently outputs is a massive pile of garbage. By massive, I mean really massive; embed code is running well over 1kilobyte. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Seriously, try it out! The HTML is pretty garbage-tacular too. It spits out an inline <style> tag in an attempt to replicate the native twitter.com profile style of the cited user. I guess they’re trying really hard to replicate the look of a screenshot.
There are numerous problems with this implementation: 1) <style> is inside <body> won’t validate in current Doctypes (AFAIK); 2) I can almost guarantee that the majority of WYSIWYG editors and/or output filters will barf up the inline style – wordpress certianly does; 3) even if you are able to post the embed, it’s quite likely that RSS readers and some browsers will ignore the <style> tag, rendering your embedded tweet illegible; 4) some of the key class names they’ve chosen – eg. timestamp, author, metadata – are not very unique and could potentially have existing styles assigned to them.
There is no real indication that this tool is experiment or “alpha,” just a short “use at your own risk.”
Blackbird Pie does not taste good. They should not have released this on a public server, it’s embarrassing.
fail twitter in Websites
17th February, 2010
“If you are … still having problems, please call your cable provider for help.”
Good luck with that.
geo-targeting hbo in Random Websites
11th September, 2009
Among other things, it’s interesting to see how much the web has changed in the last 8 years.
If I’m not mistaken, cnn actually dropped to a “low bandwidth,” less cluttered version to handle all the traffic during the crisis. Archive.org records before 9/11 show a slightly heavier site.
More CNN on Archive.org.
cnn history in Websites
15th August, 2009
UPDATE: Some visitors are reporting that this works for Hulu as well.
The relationship between Comedy Central and Canada’s Comedy Network is the worst example of what can happen when rights owners assert copyright on the internet, based on national borders. If you are not aware – like Hulu, TV.com and others – Comedy Central videos will not play in Canada, but it’s worse. ComedyCentral.com – the entire domain – is unavailable to Canadian IPs! When you try visit it, you are redirected to comedynetwork.ca.
I found a workaround to this buried in a comment thread on reddit. Firefox users only:
For Canadian viewers, if you are using firefox, install the following addon:
http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/967 then:
1) In Firefox, Go to tools->modify headers
2) From the drop down box on the left select add
3) Then enter: “X-Forwarded-For” in the first input box without the quotation marks
4) Enter: “12.13.14.15″ in the second input box without the quotation marks
5) Leave the last input box empty, and save the filter, and enable it
http://imgur.com/Feb4.png
6) Click the ‘Configuration’ tab on the right then proceed to check the ‘always on’ button.
Close the Modify Headers box and it should work.
[orginal post]
Works like a charm!
in HowTo Tips Websites
15th June, 2009
As mentioned a few posts ago, Apple’s iTunes sales reporting tools are a joke.
In walks AppFigures.com. This site provides exactly the type of data I would expect Apple to provide. It automagically grabs your iTunes sales reports every day, then uses the data to generate Google analytics style charts and graphs. Before using this site I only had a vague idea of how many apps I’d sold.
If you’re an iPhone developer I highly recommend you drop everything and start using this app.
(Thanks to Josh for the comment recommendation)
iphone apps in Review Websites
