Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Twittering

I had no real interest in Twitter until doing it at work for promotional purposes then realizing that it's pretty cool for news updates instead of simply people recording the minutae of their daily lives. When I found it's possible to display Twitter on my blog then the whole thing seemed like a good idea.

And of course there's a catch: The Twitter gadget that displays doesn't show any retweets. (After searching it turns out that there's something called a user timeline which is what's actually displayed and that doesn't have the retweets.) For me this is a big deal because those other tweets are what got me started on this at all. I found a way to put the RSS feed on the blog which does show the retweets but is darn ugly because it's doing everything as links and not just text. There might be some way to reformat this display but I can't find it easily and at the moment don't feel like doing more research. And I tried doing what's called old-style retweets which is not using Twitter's retweet button but copying and pasting the other tweet. The catch is that when the other site's name is added the character length is exceeded and I don't want to take credit by removing their name.

Couldn't Twitter just add an option to display retweets?