Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: twitter

  • Hey, Twitter, Why Do You Hate Us?

    Hey, Twitter, Why Do You Hate Us?

    Hi, Twitter.

    I know we fight a lot. You know I report a lot of abuse and harassment, and you do nothing about the Nazis, and we have our differences. But this isn’t about that. I mean, yeah, I’m salty about the Russian thing, but we need to talk about something else.

    We need to talk about using Twitter on a desktop when you have multiple accounts.

    Multiple Twitter Accounts Happen

    I have a legit reason to have multiple accounts. A good one, in fact. I have my personal account, but I have two others for brands I manage. And that means I kind of need to be able to log in to all three at once and wrangle things.

    If you use Twitter on the web, your choices are regular Twitter or Tweetdeck. The latter makes you sign up via a very convoluted process in order to grant access to accounts. Basically, you have to give your ‘main’ account access to the ones you want to manage. It’s not very obvious.

    And there are weird things missing from Tweetdeck. Like … no decent notifications. You can’t tell what you’ve read or when people @ you or anything like that. Not easily. Oh, and there’s no GIF button.

    Finally … with three accounts I get to have NINE columns. Three each for ‘home,’ ‘mentions,’ and ‘messages.’ Thanks. A lot.

    No Great Desktop App

    Here’s my problem. There’s no good Twitter desktop app. Your own app went unloved until you pulled the plug. In a tweet. Nice. Really nice. That leaves me with a few choices.

    TweetBot: I like Tweetbot, except that I can’t see polls in it, and I can’t navigate to embed Gifs. But it has a pretty decent interface. The biggest issue is that you can’t see group DMs. Sometimes keep on top breaks. Sometimes not.

    Twitterific: This is a wonderful app except that scrolling sucks. If you switch to a different account, keep on top stops working, and ⌘↑ (which should take you to the top of whatever you’re on) doesn’t scroll right. Oh and no embedding Gifs. And again, no group DMs and no polls.

    What about TweetDeck’s desktop app? It hasn’t been updated since 2015. The best version I’ve seen is Tweeten but again, I’m back to 3 columns per account.

    What I Want Is Simple

    I want the iOS app, but for the desktop. I want to have the following features:

    1. Multiple Account Support
    2. One visual ‘column’ per account (it can have sub tabs, whatever)
    3. The ability to insert and read polls
    4. Support for multi-person DMs
    5. Notifications
    6. A damn GIF button

    Instead, I get to use Tweetdeck in my browser. At least, until Twitter dumps that too.

  • Zap a Daily Tweet

    Zap a Daily Tweet

    Last week I told you how I made a random post of a day. Well, now I want to Tweet that post once a day.

    Now there are a lot (a lot) of possibilities to handle something like that in WordPress, and a lot of plugins that purport to Tweet old posts. The problem with all of them was that they used WordPress.

    There's nothing wrong with WordPress

    Obviously. But at the same time, asking WP to do 'things' that aren't it's business, like Tweeting random posts, is not a great idea. WordPress is the right tool for some jobs, but not all jobs, after all.

    What is WordPress' job is generating a random post and setting a tracker (transient) to store for a day. And it's also WordPress' job to output that data how I want in a JSON format.

    The rest, we turn to a service. Zapier.

    A Service?

    Like many WordPressers, I like to roll my own whenever humanly possible. In this case, I could have added an OAuth library and scripted a cron job, but that puts a maintenance burden on me and could slow my site down. Since I have the JSON call, all I need is 'something' to do the following:

    1. Every day, at a specific time, do things
    2. Visit a specific URL and parse the JSON data
    3. Craft a Tweet based on the data in 2

    I dithered and kvetched for days (Monday and Tuesday) before complaining to Otto on Tuesday night. He pointed out he'd written those scripts. On Wednesday, he and I bandied about ideas, and he said I should use IFTTT. Even using IFTTT's Maker code, though, the real tool needed is one that lets me code logically.

    Zapier

    The concept of IFTTT is just "If This, Then That." If one thing is true, then do another. It's very simple logic. Too simple. Because what I needed was "If this, then do that, and tell another that." There wasn't an easy way I could find to do it with IFTTT so I went to the more complicated.

    Example of what the flow looks like - Trigger is every day, action is GET, final action is tweet

    Three steps. Looks like my little three item'd list, doesn't it?

    The first step is obvious. Set a specific time to run the zap. It's a schedule. The second step is just a web hook saying 'Get the data from URL.' And the third step is aware!

    Showing the example of the tweet, with placeholders for the name and URL

    Pretty nice. If you click on the 'add field' box in the message content (upper right), it knows how to grab the variables from the previous steps and insert them. Which is damn cool.

  • Review: Twitter vs Twitter

    Review: Twitter vs Twitter

    Like most people, I use Twitter. I don’t always use the official Twitter tools for that, though. For example, I rarely use the website itself as it’s slow and annoys me. I’ve almost always used Twitter apps on my computers, too.

    In July I decided to try using the official Twitter app again. I’d stopped when, at some point, they stopped working on it. Since they’ve picked it back up, I felt I should try it out. As a whole, I like it 90% but … well let me explain.

    Tweetbot

    This is my normal, go-to Twitter app. I’ve used it for a couple years, and it meets nearly all my needs for a Twitter app. I can have multiple accounts, which is a must-have for me, and it separates my @-replies from my likes/retweets. I really like that. It also makes those @-replies a different color in my timeline so they stand out.

    But… It only tracks likes/retweets for while the app is open. So if I log off, get a million retweets, and log back in, I’ll never know. Also it lacks some of the basic Twitter features like being able to report users and seeing if my other accounts have messages etc I need to pay attention to. I have to click to expand the other accounts to see what’s going on.

    Interestingly, all third party apps, be it iOS or MacOS, seem to have this issue with the notifications. They just can’t keep track if you’re not logged in. I’m guessing it’s a matter of the API and limiting calls. Most annoyingly, recently Twitterific has just stopped showing me @-mentions from people I don’t follow.

    Twitter

    Currently it has a brain and does everything you can do on the web. Multiple accounts, which I can see at a glance who has an alert or message, and it’s easy to switch between them. One click. I can see

    Downside? Sometimes when I log back in, the Live Stream is messed up. Also the notifications and mentions and replies are all jumbled up, in the worst ways. I can’t just see replies or likes or mentions. There’s no indication that a message IS a mention in my main-timeline. And the alerts that tell me I have an unread are for notifications and mentions combined.

    That I can’t easily find my mentions, which I want to reply to, sucks.

    So Which Wins?

    Right now, Twitter’s app is winning for the simple reason of easy user status, easy user switching, and actually being able to see all my likes/retweets. Which is important in some cases. It certainly sucks that I can’t easily identify my replies, and I can’t separate mentions from notifications like I can in the web-app, but the reliability of the API is (currently) worth it.