Twitter / Dreamwidth Interaction

[random]

So, like many people, I have both a Twitter and DW account, and I've been trying to figure out how to integrate them intelligently, since I find the automated Twitter daily posts incredibly annoying in other people's journal.

So, one thing that I was playing with was seeing if DW's styling code would allow me to embed the Twitter embedded feeds And the answer seems to be clearly that no, you can't embed it - I tried both putting it in Transmogrified as custom text, and putting it in a custom S1 style as a hard-code print command right after the sidebar was drawn, and both had the scripts stripped. That seems to be the case whether you use the Flash object or the JavaScript HTML embed version. (As an aside, since people load other people's pages in their own styles sometimes, I think it's the right call for the JS - I'm a little more surprised about the Flash, but I assume that it's to prevent embedded advertising by adver-bots.)

But I'm wondering if the S2 modules could give an option of actually creating a Twitter module, that would simply take as a username as an option (presumably in Text / Options in the "Customize Styles"), and then display the badge controlling the code that's used, so there's no risk of problems with XSS or adver-bots? Would there be interest from the development team in this? If so, is there anyone who is interested in doing this, since I've got way more experience in PHP and Java development than Perl? If there's interest in the feature but no one wants to jump on it, would someone who has been working on the DW codebase be willing to give me some pointers and do a code review for me?

Comments

[matgb]

The ideal way of getting this isn't to grab stuff just from Twitter. It's to have a way of including RSS feeds (with options) as sidebar modules.

I'd like to have my most recent Tweets and my most recent posts on other blogs displaying (in seperate modules)—if we can figure out a way of having an S2 layer that parses feeds well that'd be really cool and would provide you with your solution as well as being more flexible.

But yeah, no chance of getting a flash or JS embed to work here, and I think that's a policy that should stay.

[unixronin]

The ideal way of getting this isn't to grab stuff just from Twitter. It's to have a way of including RSS feeds (with options) as sidebar modules.

+1. That would be a very nice ability to have. Some kind of an RSS-tracker object that could even appear multiple times in the sidebar, tracking multiple feeds.

[random]

OK, I really like this too, for a bunch of reasons.

But for it to work with Twitter properly, though, there'd have to be at least a few configurable options, which could make the feature rather complicated to use. The big problem is that in general, an RSS sidebar module should display both the title and the description, and possibly the post time, along with a link to the full story.

While Twitter does make RSS feeds available, so that people can follow individual Twitter accounts in an RSS reader, they'd look really wacky if you did them that way - there's an example of a Twitter RSS feed here. The title and the description are the same (format username: Tweet), and the link goes to the status update page, which just shows the same Tweet again. Drawing a Tweet the same way you'd want to draw a normal RSS feed would make for a really ugly Twitter update.

I think you'd probably also want for any RSS module to have options for the maximum description length to display, and for the number of entries to show, and I'm not sure how that would fit into the UI, although I suspect someone could come up with something clever.

That being said, it might be easier (and easier to maintain) to subclass an RSS module for a Twitter module, rather than developing one using Net::Twitter. All you'd have to do is change the display code to only show the description code, a set number of them, and link at the top to the user's main Twitter page to make a subclass work.

Including RSS feeds as sidebar modules

[ursamajor]

I would love this implementation, but wonder about potential copyright violations if one decides to embed content that isn't theirs. One way I could see to alleviate this might be to only allow feeds you've already "claimed" as yours in your profile - like how you can already include your twitter and delicious and other such social networking info in specific fields there. Similarly, for nonSN websites such as a personaltop level domain, you could include it as a module as long as you'd already claimed it in your profile.

Re: Including RSS feeds as sidebar modules

[matgb]

There's no greater copyright issue than someone embedding a youtube or copying an article. RSS feeds are there to promote content and get people to visit, if someone uses a feed they don't own, they're promoting that site.

The BBC actively encourages people to embed their feeds.

I'd have a problem claiming/proving all my sites are mine, I'd put my author feed up for the blogs I write for, they're owned by others. I'd probably even want to combine some of them using something like Pipes, and there's no way that could be claimed in any way; some of my sites would need to be piped or fed through Feedburner first anyway.

[miss_s_b]

Yeah, I'd still like to see this, four years on.