Little-known facts

Saturday, April 28, 2007 by Dave Winer.

You don't need to use Curl to get stuff from Twitter, you can use a web browser for some simple API calls to see what they return. Try clicking on this URL to see my most recent 20 status messages. 

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/davewiner.xml ;

Yeah it's XML. Hope you didn't have a heart attack.  

The docs could be much clearer about this, imho.  

Another little-known fact, the RSS feeds that provide code updates for all the various components of the OPML Editor now have comments, that explain what changed in each update. I never release a part without explaining it (knock wood, praise Murphy, don't sue me if I don't). Here's an example, the feed for opml.root. 

http://bits.codecasting.org/opml.root/rss.xml ;

Should have done this a long time ago. I'm going to push some Twitter-related updates today, they should show up in that feed. This means you might want to also subscribe to these feeds in your aggregator or feed reader, because they now include human-readable bits. Unless you're a programmer the notes will likely not make much sense, but that's one way learn programming, almost by osmosis.