Love this.

[via One Trick Pony in FlickR]

If your library doesn’t support the HTTP DELETE method (like the official PHP OAuth extension), you can still make a call by doing the following:

• tell Twitter to use delete with a parameter called _method with the value DELETE (eg. _method=DELETE)
• send the request using HTTP POST method

Here’s an example of doing this using the PHP OAuth extension

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$client = new OAuth(MY_CONSUMER_KEY, MY_CONSUMER_SECRET, OAUTH_SIG_METHOD_HMACSHA1);
$client->setToken($userKey, $userSecret);
 
// ... set up the url and parameters for the call (eg. $url and $params)
$url = "http://api.twitter.com/1/..... .json";
$params = array("some_key"=>"someValue");
$params["_method"] = "DELETE";    // supply the _method param with a value of DELETE
 
$client->fetch($url, $params, OAUTH_HTTP_METHOD_POST);    // use POST
$result = json_decode($client->getLastResponse(), true);

Just click on a tweet’s text in any column to translate it. The text will show up in a ligher grey when the translation is finished. All links in the tweet will continue to work properly after translation.

The script is simple and thrown together hastily, and uses Google Translate to do the translation, so don’t expect perfect translations (often you have to put a bit of thought into deciphering the translated text, and sometimes they just come out unintentionally humorous).

Interested in listening to your entire audience? Grab the HootSuite translator script or view the script source. If English isn’t your primary language, you can also have tweets in HootSuite translated to Japanese [HS translator Japanese] and German [HS translator German] as well!

To install this script in your HootSuite Fluid app (Mac), visit the script page and save the script to your desktop, then drag it into your HootSuite Fluid app.

For more goodies to empower your social media reach, visit http://hootsuite.com/apps!

I thought up a random gift.

After work, I headed over to Urban Outfitters (a great place for miscellaneous toys and things), and dug around. I wanted to get a camera, since I believe everyone at work likes taking photos. Unfortunately, most of the Lomos and the Holga cameras were way out of this budget (ranging from $50-90). Fortunately I found a LOL CAM, which is a single-use camera with funny stuff pre-printed on the film.

Great choice! But the camera was $14. Not to worry, my fridge was stocked some Innis & Gunn beers, each worth $3. I decided to include two of them. This gift is now epic!

No, not yet. What about wrapping? How does one present two beers and a camera? I think my gift is way too awesome to be given away in a gift bag. It deserves presentation greatness. Here’s the gift, in pieces:

I’ve decided to put it all in an old Converse shoe box. The beers will be kept safe with bubble wrap and package from buying ram at Newegg. All of this will be wrapped with a lining from a Diesel shoe box.

Alright, the beers are packed and so is the camera. But there is still some empty space in the box, which must be padded to prevent the contents from shifting. I know, I shall include the latest issue of Synergy, the UBC Science journal (which I get in exchange for receiving phone calls to donate money to my graduate faculty).

Now it is ready to be wrapped up. While looking for scotch tape, I found tissue paper wrapping that came with a Club Monaco shirt I bought, and decided to use it to wrap the gift. This is getting classy!

It’s done – my masterpiece. The gift even pretends it’s from Club Monaco, with the sticker, but my wrapping skills are too weak for anyone with common sense to be fooled. Either way, someone’s going to get an awesome gift this year.

I can’t publish this post until tomorrow afternoon, but I will announce who received this epic Christmas gift. Stay tuned.

Edit: my Christmas gift went over even better than I thought, and now belongs to the amazing Nadia Nascimento (in case you haven’t heard of this amazing woman, read this interview!)

Remove the “w” from “Twitter”.

Twitter, the popular microblogging site, becomes “Titter”.
Tweets, messages from said app, become “Teets”.
Twits, users of Twitter, come “Tits”.

Coincidence? Or was I just thinking about mammaries at 9:47 am?

“Griddy” is all about discovery and relevancy. I don’t publish many time-sensitive posts, so I drew the focus away from the reverse cronological view of most blogs and opted for an archive view. The grid design is inspired by the SSENSE site interface, and I’ve added some neat features such as the post thumbnail/title display, and the single category archive view.

I did this over a few evenings to get this idea out quickly. A few issues I have noticed are:

• massive lists/duplication in category grids, due to my careless tagging of posts!
• font can be a bit small, and made worse by font-smoothing (esp. in Safari)
• post thumbnail/title display may not be very informative

I believe this theme has a lot of potential.  I’ll be tweaking it often, so if you have any thoughts please leave a comment!

[MacFuse Google Groups]
[Tomas Carnecky's site]

HootSuite is a very powerful web-based Twitter client. It runs inside your browser, meaning that there’s nothing to install, and you can access it and use it the same way from any computer.

(Disclosure: I am currently a developer on the HootSuite team)

However, I came from a background of Twitterrific, Tweetdeck, and other desktop Twitter apps, and running HootSuite inside a tab in my browser just doesn’t feel right.  I need my Twitter fix right on my dock!

Fortunately, there’s an app on the Mac called Fluid, which allows you to create a site-specific browser that acts as a separate application.  Download Fluid and open it up!  Also, download this HootSuite icon – we will use it as the app icon (for displaying in the dock).

This is the main Fluid set up screen, here you can enter http://hootsuite.com as the URL, and give a name to the app (HootSuite, HootSuite Twitter client, etc):

Next, click on the Icon dropdown and choose “Other…”, and choose the HootSuite icon downloaded earlier.  Fluid should give you a preview of it:

That’s it!  Click “Create” and let Fluid do its magic.

Success!  Choose “Launch Now” and don’t forget to keep the icon in your dock (right-click on the dock icon and choose “Keep in Dock”).

Update:

You may have experienced your new HootSuite fluid app opening the site in a new browser window (instead of inside the fluid app itself).  That surely defeats the point of having a site-specific browser!  To fix it, goto your HootSuite fluid app’s preference:

Choose “Advanced”, and edit the very first entry in the “Pattern” list (double click on it), and change it to *.hootsuite.com*:

That should do it!  (Thanks to commenter Tim for pointing the issue out)

“Weak bonds give you novelty”

Andrew McAfee said this at an Oracle/BEA conference I attended in Chicago.  Strong bonds are people who you have a deep connection with and are usually like-minded and have similar experiences.  People you don’t have have a close link with – weak bonds – are likely to provide new perspectives, opinions, and ideas.

I think that Twitter allows us to discover and build weak bonds extremely well, better than other social networking tools.