What am I up to?

Sunday, February 24, 2008 by Dave Winer.

I have a neat little app that runs in the OPML Editor that, every five minutes, gathers all the new twits from people I'm following, and runs them over a set of "callback" scripts, that can do whatever they want to with them. The first one I wrote looks for an exclamation point at the beginning of one of the ones I wrote and routes it to a special place on Scripting News. 

This is quite visible because 4700 people follow me on Twitter, and they all see the exclams at the beginning of some of my twits, and some have asked for the script. Not much point in that, because it only works with my one-off CMS. It could be made to work with blogs that use the OPML Editor outliner, but there aren't many of those. If someone in that community asks, I'll upload the app, and keep it updated, that's easy, but without support (not easy).  

I may add the ability to put callbacks in a folder outside the OPML Editor, written in AppleScript, if there's enough interest. But that's not a promise.  

I wrote this for myself -- not to solve a problem for others.  

I think the right way to deal with this, btw, is for the developers of Wordpress, Movable Type, Blogger, etc to do the polling of Twitter on behalf of their users. I think Twitter makes a decent linkblogging user interface. People with blogs are using it that way -- I am. Now I don't have to feel so guilty because the links make their way back to Scripting News, where they started.