Backup your twitter contacts
The last day or so twitter has had some following/follower contacts issues where people lost contacts. They are working to restore them but for those that wish you can make a backup of your contacts for reference periodically just to have a record of it in the case of disaster.
This method will work for those who are following less than 100 people. Make a call to the twitter API like this.
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends.xml
If your following more than 100 people you will need to add the page parameter which will return the next 100 you are following, append the parameter page=2 for instance
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends.xml?page=2
for the next 100, keep adding 1 to the page until you capture all your followers then merge the data in excel or some other tool.
What will be returned will be an xml file of the people you are following. You can save this file then import it into excel or some other tool for archival. In excel choose file-> open and select the xml file you saved from above. Select read only workbook and it will give you a nice spreadsheet format of the data that you can save to a regular excel file. This should work in open office but I don’t have it installed to check.
To archive the people following you use the same method but the following url
http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.xml
You can apply the same logic as the above page=2 to capture followers beyond the first 100 such as
http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.xml?page=2
Happy twittering
Windows Mobile Rocks
So, As my loyal readers (all 3 of you) may have noticed over the last few weeks I’ve been waffling on the whole iPhone 3g thing. I had to travel last week for an entire week and spent large amounts of time away from a PC. My friend has an iPhone that was updated to the 2.0 software so I got to spend allot of time on it while traveling. I also was reminded just how indispensable my windows mobile 6.1 HTC kaiser is.
I realized a couple things while essentially going head to head with my friend both doing similar work. I was able to stay connected to IM using shape services IM+ the entire time we traveled. This was a real benefit. We were in all day meetings and being able to answer emails via exchange push email as well as monitor IM for quick questions from people back at work was great. I was taking text from IM messages with some stats a colleague sent me and copying and pasting them into an excel spreadsheet I had open the whole week on my phone.
Of course I had ceTwit running the entire time also pulling my timeline every 3 minutes so I could stay up to date on that.
All in all I was a multitasking fool during that week on my phone. I got allot of use out of the today screen checking if I had gotten any new IM’s and checking in on emails and some rss feeds I had scrolling above my next few calendar entries.
My time spent on the iPhone was a mixed bag. I loved the poker game Texas hold em. I think this is an Apple authored game and its really fun. The graphics are stunning and th way it flips from one on one interaction with the players and their short video’s to a table layout when you rotate the phone is dead sexy. The iPhone browser is also hands down the best thing going on a mobile device right now. I’m using the opera 9.5 beta and its pretty fantastic but it’s not quite the same as using mobile safari. The iPhone screen has allot to do with this perception I think. The real estate and resolution make for a fantastic mobile web experience. My Kaiser is only 320×240 resolution compared to the iPhone 480×320, and the way you access tabs and zooming on the iPhone rocks.
As I played around on my friends iPhone I think I’m ok with the on screen keyboard. I even think I’d still happy with an iPhone as I ultimately decided a few weeks ago but the lack of multitasking really has me down and reconsidering right now. I don’t see how the notifications they are going to enable this fall are really going to give me the same feel as being able to run about 6 applications at the same time like I can on my Kaiser.
The Windows Mobile today screen gets bashed allot for being ulgy and busy but I honestly hope they don’t change it much in windows mobile 7. It may not be the prettiest thing but you sure can pack allot of information on there and get snippits from lots of different sources coagulated into one screen. I feel like there is a lack of information on the iPhone when I turn it on. I’m so used to having my eyes blasted with all my pertinent info when I turn on my phone and the today screen pops up. Maybe its the techie in me but having lots of buttons and gauges isn’t a bad thing in my book.
I still think I’d be happy on an iPhone due primarily to the web experience but I think I’m going to do one more windows mobile phone and see what lies in store with windows mobile 7 coming hopefully early next year. I promise this is the last time I’ll change my mind, for real, at least this week.
ceTwit 2.0 Release Candidate 1
I’m making the 2.0 release candidate public today. It’s available for touchscreen devices on the download page. There are many new features and enhancements in the new version.
- Timeline will refresh even with device sleeping
- Timeline stores up to 200 tweets
- Threaded for better performance
- Ping.fm support
- Dynamic font size and timeline height so you can tune to your screen size/desired look
- Current twitter rate limit check
- Connect on startup preference
- Auto refresh on startup preference
- Color coded replies
- Favorites support
- Deletion of own tweets
- Twitpic last used folder remembered
These are the new features, the previous features are all still here including twitpic support. Hit the download page or update from the ceTwit about page. Note this RC1 will replace your current 1.4 version.
[download]
ceTwit 2.0 adds Ping.fm support
I’ve been working to add in ping.fm support and finally got it working this morning. Thanks to the guys at ping.fm for being accessible to troubleshoot.
Update methods now include:
Leveraging ping.fm will allow you to update all kinds of social networks from inside ceTwit distributing your message automatically to all your social networks.
Initially support is included for the “default” method which posts to your default profile settings at ping.fm.
ceTwit 2 now with more Fail Whale #failwhale
I added in some additional error checking on responses from the twitter API that should now indicate if an error occured inline in the timeline. Once a subsequent succesfull transaction occurs the error will be removed from the timeline.
I’m hoping for a final candidate beta release by this coming weekend July 12th or so.
ceTwit 2.0 beta screencast
I’ve started from scratch rewriting ceTwit for windows mobile pro. There were lots of things I wanted to clean up in the code base and it turned out to just be easier to start from scratch and get the code in a more maintainable format.
The big win for this version is some threading and timeline reloading even if the phone is sleeping with the screen off.
New features:
- Threading for speedier experience
- Copy tweet to clipboard
- Retweet
- Refresh even if phone sleeping
- Reply highlighting
- Timeline loads up to 200 tweets
- View twitters rate limit and your stats
Planning to release it in a week or so, There is a small pool of beta testers doing the hard work of finding all the bugs I missed. If you wish to participate send me a DM or use the sites contact form and I’ll shoot you an invite.
Here is a screencast of the new version
FriendFeed for Firefox sidebar via iPhone site
FriendFeed recently introduced an iPhone friendly version of its site with a few enhancements to make it render better on the iPhone. A neat trick you can pull is to make a bookmark of this site and set it to open in your firefox sidebar.
Create the bookmark to http://www.friendfeed.com/i
Once you do that simply close it up and select the bookmark from the Bookmarks menu to get your new friendfeed sidebar to open.
