Some things can be expressed powerfully in less than 140 characters.

Joel Housman: "Remember when Planned Parenthood & NPR crashed the market, wiped out half our 401Ks and took TARP money? Me neither."

 4/10/2011; 8:34:56 PM.   .

A couple of weekend's ago I threw in the towel and wrote my own mini-version of TwitterFeed that would work for users of my minimal blogging tool. I've released the code as an OPML Editor tool, so at least in theory it could be installed by others. That's the plan, eventually, that it will be running on lots of servers, so as to spread out the load. TwitterFeed, while it's a marvelous public service, suffers from being centralized, in many of the same ways Twitter itself does.

Anyway, I've mostly got it working. However it fails to post some messages. Twitter says they have an incorrect signature. Here are a few of the tweets.

Coming soon: A Twitter camera. (Scripting News). http://r2.ly/a9rk

'The Suburbs of Manhattan' - Living in the West 70s. http://r2.ly/a9rh

Quote For The Day II (from Andrew Sullivan's new home at TDB). http://r2.ly/a9qm

What do they have in common? Punctuation.

But here's the thing -- it looks like Twitter's encoding and mine agree. They echo back the parameters. Not sure if it's their version they're echoing or mine (hence the confusion).

Wondering if any of you guys have been down this path and can offer some suggestions?

I looked for a Twitter OAuth debugger. Maybe there is one...

Help much appreciated.

Update: Solved with the help of Simon Jenson. I was not encoding left and right parens or single quotes. The OAuth spec is pretty clear. Thanks!

Update #2: Here's a table of the encodings for each of the characters generated by string.urlEncode, a built-in verb in OPML Editor that I've been updating to make this encoding work.

 4/10/2011; 8:13:18 PM.   .

There was just a new media conference in Boston, that judging from who was there, I would have loved to have been at. It would have been great to catch up with so many of the people who were there. Problem is, as with so many conferences -- I didn't find out about this one until it was too late. This time it came in a tweet from Greg Mitchell about a panel he had just finished about WikiLeaks. I would have loved to have been there for that, and to shake his hand. We've never met, except online. I'm an admirer of his work. I'd like to tell him about what I'm doing, show him -- I think it could make his job easier and make his work more useful to others.

Could a web service help here? Maybe it could.

A few years ago I invested in a service called Confabb. Its purpose is to organize information about conferences. It could have developed into a social network for conferences. I don't doubt that such a thing is possible, and needed. Each conference is of course a social network. And a network of all conferences is a super-social network. Someday we will have such a thing. I'm sure of it.

Now there probably are already services people use for this. Is that how you all find out about conferences? Me, I'm too lazy. I'd like to get messages from my friends saying we noticed you weren't signed up for this one -- and we think you should be there. Maybe that would help fill in the gaps?

 4/10/2011; 2:33:09 PM.   .