greg smart

Okay, I have to admit that I have been pretty resistant to exploring twitter. In that I tend to be a solitary creature I honestly do not understand why anyone cares what I am eating, drinking or thinking during the course of an average day.

Apart from myself, my partners have been fervently investigating twitter over the last few months and have finally gotten my attention as they have debated how practical applications of the “micro-blog” can be realized in a profitable manner.

RSS & News Delivery

Following a brainstorming session the other day I began thinking about how I could take a single site and apply Twitter in a truly effective way. Over the past few months we have been developing a web site for a local University and are beginnning to place the finishing touches on it. As I worked in MODX utilizing the Ditto snippet to create an RSS page for the news section I wondered if there was a method for feeding RSS into Twitter. Well, of cours there is: twitterfeed. All I had to do was sign up for a twitter account, sign up for a twitterfeed account, go through a short configuration page and my news posts were now being fed onto a new twitter page.

I think the most obvious advantage to handling news posts in this way is derived from the ability to push time sensitive data to a user through a mobile device, ultimately, from a CMS. Since this is a University site I felt this was a particularly practical example since management of campus security considerations has become a priority issue for schools.

My Partners

So, here it is: YOU WERE RIGHT.

I will probably never twitter my concerns for world peace or global warming, but I will admit that there are definite practical implications for a “micro-blogging” service like twitter.

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I still don’t get it (full post):

I have been Twittering for about 48 hours now and I do have to admit I still do not get it, but with that said it is somewhat addictive. As I sit at work, I have an app on my desktop call Twhirl that I can instantly type my thoughts. While I am out of the office, I can type messages into Google Talk on my Blackberry and they show up. And finally, as I was sitting in my recliner tonight, for some strange reason I had the urge to log into the system and type something. The information is meaning less, I think, but I still had the urge to do it. It has also evolked a blog post on my blog which has been dorment since inception.

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I recently created a MODx snippet using a technique described on CSS-Tricks. This little bit of PHP code calls in the Yahoo Weather RSS feed and allows you to generate output that can be styled using CSS and your own icons. You can modify the first line of the snippet below to output weather specific to your zip code.

I first created the snippet ‘Weather’ ( Here is the snippet code.), then simply placed the snippet call on the appropriate page: [!Weather?!]. I then used my CSS document to style the output and created containers that would display the appropriate class ( Here is my CSS document). I created a div tag that carried my icon as a background image. I figured if Yahoo generated a tag that was unaccounted for in my CSS then my scheme would continue to display the appropriate text while leaving the adjacent background image undisplayed (as opposed to the little red Xs if I had used an image tag). Since I am using transparent gifs, I figured no one would be the wiser should this occur. Gif’s were derived from Nordic Weather.

You can see it in action on the Batesville, Arkansas Area Chamber of Commerce website.

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