The idea was to get the original stuff first, to give me a way to jot down an idea in Twitter, so I could recall it later when I'm officially writing my blog for the day.#
It worked okay, it was great at first actually, but it required too much work to reassemble a twitter thread for my blog.#
What I really wanted was a tool that could gather a whole thread, like the one you're reading now, into a series of paragraphs, that could then be edited into a blog post.#
But there was a missing feature in the Twitter API. No way to ask for all the replies to a given tweet.#
Then a few days ago while my mind was wandering, I figured it out. Get the timeline for the person, and figure out which messages are in reply to the main tweet of the thread, or to one of its replies, and build the thread outside of Twitter that way. It worked.#
So now I needed a thread to test it with. Something non-trivial, that could also be somewhat meta. And that my friends is what this thread is for. Thanks for your indulgence! :-)#
Last update: Wednesday March 10, 2021; 12:08 PM EST.
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)