bjartek blog

Brainstorming dekstop twitter client features

2009-03-01T00:00:00-08:00

01 March 2009 – Kristiansand, Norway

There are several twitter clients out there, but I feel that noen of them really fills the needs I have with twitter. I currently just use the webpage mostly. Sometimes I use twitterfic and get new tweets through growl.

This post is a brainstorming in features for a desktop twitter client.

when fetching new tweets only process items that are not processed before. Does twitter support modified-since stuff so that it is possible to only fetch tweets after a given time?
filter incomming tweets. Based upon regex in the tweet, author of the tweet
block noisy buddies
create presets for filters/blocks so that it is possible to tune the client for given contexts. Sometimes you do not want to see all types of tweets
retweeting support. and reply support with custom templates to do so.
add urls to delicious support. automatically tag with #hashtags in tweet
reply-to history.
set refresh rate
lots of keyboard shortcuts. post new tweet, reply to active element, retweet active element, move to next/prev element, if reply see originating message.
ability to customize keyboard shortcuts in some way. ( I like vim, others like emacs..)
show remaining requests allowed to twitter
decouple GUI and engine so that is is possible to build several GUI’s on top of the engine
inspector view for currently selected tweet. To see profile, image etc.
process FriendsTimeline and predefined searches.

David Briccetti has experimented with a twitter client in scala and swing. Several of these features are in his client.

If anybody know of a twitter library that has some or more of these features then please let me know.

New blog design, problem with active menu element in jekyll

2009-02-19T00:00:00-08:00

19 Feb 2009 – Kristiansand, Norway

Decided that I wanted to freshen up my blog a little bit. I like the design of jboner and that of mojombo so I set out to create a page inspired by them.

I like the new design but I have one issue with jekyll that I am not sure how to solve. For my menu to work I need to set some css properties on the li of the active element.

I guess this could be solved if I specified the menu as YAML in my default template and then checked on the page.title element to set the propper id/class elements. I am not sure how to do this in jekyll currently. If you can help me with this please send me a ping on twitter or in #jekyll on freenode.

In order to solve my active menu element problem I have currently put the menu div in each of the pages instead of in the default template.

Dynamic menu highlighting in github pages

2009-02-19T00:00:00-08:00

19 Feb 2009 – Kristiansand, Norway

Earlier today I blogged that I had problems with getting a dynamic menu configured in github pages.

After some research and peeking at the jekyll source I found a sollution. In the
default style place the following yaml frontmatter:

---
menu: 
- id: home
  url: /
- id: archive
  url: /content/archive.html
- id: talk
  url: /content/talk.html
- id: resume
  url: /content/resume.html
- id: about
  url: /content/about.html

Then in all pages place a yaml frontmatter like:

---
layout: default
id: home
title: The title of the page/post

This id tells the system that the following page should highlight the home tab.

The actual code to present the menu can be seen below. I had to replace {} with
() to get liquid to not parse the actual code.

<div id="navcontainer">
  <ul id="navlist">
    (% for element in page.menu %)
      (% if page.id == element.id %)
        <li id="active">
          <a href="(( element.url ))" id="current">(( element.id ))</a>
         </li>
      (% else %)
        <li><a href="(( element.url ))">(( element.id ))</a></li>
      (% endif %)
    (% endfor %)
  </ul>
</div>

Feel free to reuse this code example in your blog if you want a dynamic menu.

Scala book in the house

2008-12-20T00:00:00-08:00

19 Dec 2008 – Kristiansand, Norway

Today I received the deadtree version of my Programming in Scala/Stairway book. I can’t wait to read the final paper version of the book. I have read most of the earlier betas but have not had the time to read the final version yet.

Good timing as well, just when my christmas break starts.

Congrats to Bill, Martin, Lex, Artima and the Scala community.

Staring up github blog

2008-12-19T00:00:00-08:00

19 Dec 2008 – Kristiansand, Norway

Yesterday I read about GitHub Pages and I just had to try it out. I think git it really cool and I love the work of the github staff. They constantly improve their offering and that is something I respect.

In order to create this page I took my old blueprint based design and borrowed
some setup tips for Jekyll from mojombo.

Keep up the good work github!