I Used to Like Twitter

I was a fairly early Twitter adopter.  I had a Twitter account long before I had a Facebook account.  I think as someone who did a personal blog the micro-blogging aspect of Twitter was appealing to me.  I never really worried about how many followers I had, it was just fun to be able to bring my particular brand of snark to the masses.  As a sarcastic curmudgeon the quip is one of my strong suits.  Twitter very much played to my strengths.

There used to be this service called LoudTwitter that would aggregate one day's worth of Twitter posts and post them to a blog.  This was something that seemed tailor made for me and lead first to the "Shorties" posts on this blog - right up until the service disappeared.  Later it supported the "140 Characters or Less..." posts when the service returned - right up until the service disappeared again.  I keep wondering if there's some way to recreate this functionality myself using IFTTT and Google Sheets.  I wonder about it a lot, but not enough to try to solve it.  I should look to see if IFTTT has a community where you can suggest recipes for someone else to write.

I used to have my Twitter feed linked to my Facebook feed so that whenever I posted to Twitter it echoed the post to Facebook.  Recently as part of tightening their privacy and security setup Facebook disabled this functionality.  It looks like they've disabled any third party posting functionality.

A significant amount of my tweeting used to be about work.  Each time after class I would tweet out what we'd done that day, things like "Technical Direction 3 - Transportation Protection."  I liked doing that primarily as alumni outreach on Facebook.  The tweet would crosspost to Facebook and then occasionally former students would have something to say about that day's content.  I'm not sure why, but without the crossposting element I've found that I've stopped putting the content on Twitter.  Beyond that, I could just put that content directly on Facebook, but I don't want to.  I have no idea why not.  It almost feels petulant, like I am refusing to adapt to the new landscape purely out of stubborness.  (Even stupider, Twitter allows third party posting such that I could easily implement an IFTTT recipe to crosspost a Facebook entry to Twitter.  But I'm not gonna.  Can't make me.)

As a result of the changes my Twitter activity has dropped to almost zero and my Facebook activity has been reduced to mostly posting web articles from Feedly.  I'm really in a position where I could, probably, just drop both services and not miss them much.  Maybe I should.

31 for 31

This is post 31 in 31 days.  So there's that.  Nice to set out a goal and meet it.  That seems to happen less often now than in the past.  I only had one real miss.  The day got away from me once and I wound up posting after midnight.  There was one real punt - maybe two - posts that were pretty much just photographs.  At least four of the posts were essentially freebies: keeping up with the "Worth a Look" posts culled from the Greenpage.  Still, 31 for 31, that's nice.

This is post 3701 for the blog since its inception.  That's no small potatoes either.  Many, many of those are also "Worth a Look" and going back there were easily dozens if not hundreds of "shorties" posts: daily aggregations of Twitter posts.  I really miss those.  I've been looking for a way to use IFTTT to create my own Twitter to Blogger daily aggregator but alas to date there's no joy.  It likely includes some kind of Goggle Docs middle step:

1. For every tweet make a new entry in the doc
2. Each day create a Blogger post from the new doc data

The problem is I don't know how to get IFTTT to recognize new information from old.  I don't want to wind up having to do any of it manually.  That would defeat the purpose.

The run of posts have identified at least 3 unique readers, well two if you don't count Mrs. TANBI.  And FWIW Mrs. TANBI tells me that even though the site is in her RSS that the posts are TLDR for her.  So: THANK YOU VERY MUCH FRITZ AND ETHAN for reading.  I hope it is interesting.  The Blogger Stats page for the blog says that pretty much all days have more than 20 views, with many days topping 100.  So also: thanks to all of you that are reading that aren't Fritz or Ethan.

I really wish the reticence that has been a posting inhibitor for me wasn't.  I do have a lot to say, but it isn't worth this.  If you haven't read that, you should.  If after reading it you systematically delete all of your social media accounts I won't begrudge you that.  Don't forget your LinkedIn, and your MySpace, and your Pinterest, and...  It is amazing the number of online things that became social sites.  I guess there really is money to be made from social networks.

I'm pretty sure there won't be 30 posts in August.  But I will try to make it more than four crossposts.

Shorties

• 12:44 Check check check #
• 17:09 Behind the Scenes - Carnegie Mellon University: bit.ly/a9GsSE via @addthis #
• 18:07 @aerdin good recruiting? #
• 22:37 @aerdin pretty much all press is recruiting or development #

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Shorties

• 11:00 RT @CarnegieMellCFA: Alana Clapp (A '10), past PTM major in the School of Drama, featured on CMU homepage: bit.ly/bPp9U6 #
• 11:06 Prekie Tech Production - Rigging Engineering Considerations #
• 14:34 Prekie Drafting - Orthographic Multiview #

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Shorties

• 16:28 office #
• 19:48 @giantspatula @rachelyra Have you two met? You should. #

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Shorties

• 12:51 Sign's up. Guess it's for real. yfrog.com/2cx00lj #
• 19:12 anyone aware of a way 2 migrate photos from 1 sit 2 another? AOL put all of my photos on Photoworks & I'd rather they B at Picasa or Flickr #
• 19:22 Is there any reason to maintain my LinkedIn account? #
• 22:31 @jkrall Marisa was just saying there should be something like FanGo for the turnpike. Picks the next rest stop, gives choices, preorders... #

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Shorties

• 21:41 Mad Mex. Hoping for no unexpected calls this time. #
• 21:44 Dan Gilbert, owner of Cavs AND fatheads.com lowers price of LeBron Fathead to $17.41, the year Benedict Arnold was born. (via @tcschwa) #
• 21:47 Oh. My. God. And has it already started? Mankind finally fucked up real, real good. j.mp/cosLzA (via @ebertchicago) #
• 23:23 Planning to try to get back to everyone soon. Thanks for all the good wishes. #

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Shorties

• 10:42 Starting to wonder what's next. #
• 10:43 Building stairs? Make sure tread width is actually big enough for average adult shoe. Actress's in heels will thank you (via @backstagejobs) #
• 10:44 Listening to a ballad by Tom Waits is like having an intervention directed by Bertold Brecht and David Lynch. (via @mattigray) #
• 17:48 Retained an attorney #
• 20:19 Ice cream #
• 23:31 @bpeoples to help with the estate stuff #
• 23:33 RT @CarnegieMellCFA: Emmy noms in act/art direction 4 alums Ted Danson, John Shaffner, Ann Shea, Bernard Vyzga, John Shaffner & Joe Stewart! #
• 00:06 I am in desperate need of an Inbox Zero exercise. #

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Shorties

• 11:56 RT @thesulk If I were 2% different as a person, I'd play frisbee all the time. (via @SarahKSilverman) #
• 13:22 Line at Michael's is LONG. Suggestions? #
• 13:24 Text of the eulogy is on my blog page. #

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Shorties

• 10:01 Off to Dad's service. #
• 19:53 Thanks to everyone who came out today. #
• 23:40 Long day for me. Thanx again to everyone that came out. If you want to but couldn't today, we're receiving guests again Wednesday after 5pm #

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Shorties

• 22:06 Supposed to be writing a eulogy. Procrastinating. #
• 23:49 ok, creative writing task complete #

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Shorties

• 11:14 Happy Birthday USA! #
• 14:50 Deerfield family day. #
• 15:08 It's complicated. Maybe not complicated, exactly, but... twitpic.com/22f0bo (via @ebertchicago) #
• 18:41 nice when you shoot from the hip and hit the bullseye #
• 23:19 blew off fireworks to go to the movies... and then wound up seeing three different displays on the way out #

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Shorties

• 20:33 Not tweeting much #

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Shorties

• 06:42 Up too early. #
• 14:45 Filling at a BP #nochoiceturnpike #
• 21:30 60035 #

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Shorties

• 10:49 July. Zoom. #
• 15:37 Pasta ala MDF complete #
• 15:52 @bpeoples @tcschwa there will be pasta pictures later - tomorrow maybe, on my page. It's likely not what you're thinking. #
• 16:12 at some point I really do have to get to this email #
• 17:14 If I uninstall and then reinstall iTunes on my PC will anything happen to my music files? Lost a .dll someplace and this is maybe the fix. #
• 17:47 Cooking is carpentry: bit.ly/cq0VtH #
• 21:25 Wow. So not ready for that. #
• 23:51 Bed time. Right, like that's gonna happen. #

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Shorties

• 12:11 @bpeoples LOL "I'm on a bike" the first one was better, but this is good too. #
• 17:07 @aerdin Sushi counter is closed during the summer. #
• 19:53 "wiping with your shirt" should not be a reliable data recovery method. #

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Shorties

• 10:57 Truck started. #caughtabreak #
• 11:01 Bloomberg Businessweek: "What's Your College Degree Worth?" Carnegie Mellon ranks in top 20: ht.ly/24EYW (via @CarnegieMellon) #
• 12:02 Which do you think is closer to the engineering properties of 96" Spaghetti: 1/2x1/2 MDF or 3/4x3/4 MDF? #
• 14:19 Drafting - Intro, lineweight, lettering #
• 14:21 @caryatiddreams #redundantredundant #
• 15:37 To my Nevada peeps - PLEASE don't ignore Ms. Angle bit.ly/aJNrou #
• 19:03 Save or pitch? bit.ly/cuJ14E Going through old t-shirts. It's possible I should be on "Hoarders" #

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Shorties

• 17:44 Pick up the truck at the shop... and it doesn't start :-/ #
• 19:31 Al Franken wants you to step up: dscc.org/give?donate_page_KEY=8050&amount=x #
• 19:38 TeePee's bullshit reasons for "rescheduling" their national conventional only two weeks in advance. j.mp/9pHKc5 (via @ebertchicago) #
• 19:42 Pre-college students are all around campus, including CFA: bit.ly/bGq7P (via @CarnegieMellCFA) #

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Shorties

• 10:51 Pamela's #
• 12:44 Gonna run my prekies at 150% duty cycle: yfrog.com/jb16666534j #
• 22:24 Very little internet today. #

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Shorties

• 10:13 Hoping today doesn't turn out overly complicated, or expensive. #
• 10:35 @giantspatula there are a lot of people in Pittsburgh having that same Halloween thought this weekend. bit.ly/cNAWvn #
• 13:09 Back on your heads. #
• 14:48 No call from the garage yet :-/ #

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