It is so easy to love a certain effect and want to use that everywhere. Not all projects need to have the selections sitting on a perfectly lit wooden bookshelf. On one hand we want to be creative and make something that is appealing and can sell the product. On the other side we have to question the cost of that approach on the experience itself and balance style and function with purpose.

link

ATMs were first introduced over 40 years ago and since then many features have been incrementally added to the machines, in order to fulfill the dream of a truly “automated teller”. Modern ATMs offer a wide range of banking transactions; nevertheless the actual interaction has remained largely untouched.

link

So far, this app seems incredibly useful for several purposes. I’m using it to quickly record the measurements of rooms in our house. It’s also handy to note the dimensions of some bookshelves in our daughter’s room, so we’ll know what can fit inside. I can easily imagine several other uses too. Here’s a direct link to My Measures in the iTunes Store. link

But to the geeky or trained, the desktop is a fount of power and speed. Documents are side by side, text flies from here to there, IMs are answered and dismissed, mockups reloaded, batches processed, all with tiny movements of the fingers. For those of us who work all day on computers, touch interfaces are not an impending disruption.

link

Steve Jobs’ vision for Apple, repeated in yesterday’s keynote address, posits that the company operates at the intersection between technology and the liberal arts. I think it’s reasonable to regard fine typography as falling within that mandate, but unfortunately, they are falling short of that promise. Building a great display for typography without building great typographic tools is a dereliction of duty.

link

As any experienced meditator knows, the mind has a mind of its own. Left free to wander, that's just what it will do. When we manage the infinite demands on our attention by trying to juggle them all, we literally weaken our capacity for absorbed focus.

link

I’m seeing lots of other folks building out their own archive. And lots of them are using the WordPress solution I wrote about. So in the interest of providing a rough starting point, I’m making the WP theme files for my tweet archive available here (under a CC license) for anyone who wants them as a base. Download tweets.zip (39 KB).

One followup note… Andy Graulund (@graulund) is building a similar tweet archive that is much more robust and more awesome than my original. His is a PHP-based solution (no WordPress required) with embedded media, permalinks back to Twitter, graphs showing tweet activity, and more. I believe he’s planning on releasing his source soon. Keep an eye out for that.

—

WordPress-based browsable, searchable archive of tweets by Douglas Bowman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

One year later, I’m just as eager and excited to head into work today as I was then. More so. Because I know even more about this growing company, the amazing people who work for it, the humbling principles under which it operates, and the myriad of purpose it serves. I’m thrilled with what we’ve accomplished in Design, and with the designers we’ve hired to do the accomplishing. We’ve pushed out some “good” and a fair amount of “awesome” so far. But we still have much work to do.

It’s cliché, but still true. Time flies when you’re having fun. And what fun we’ve been having. Here’s to looking back at a fantastic year, and forward to another that puts last year to shame.

I know there are a few apps or scripts that create backups and much more for you. But I wanted a database and simple UI completely within my own control. One that wouldn’t go away if the developer abandoned it. So one Saturday a few weeks ago, in a little over an hour, I had my own, free, browsable, searchable tweet archive. Now I can easily browse back to my very first tweet, or search for those quotes by Paul Rand I tweeted last year. This isn’t anything entirely new. I’m just writing it up what works for me in case it helps fit some pieces together.

How to set up your own tweet archive with WordPress

1. Assuming you have a collection of past tweets, the first step is to collect them in one place. TweetBackup.com provides an easy way to do this. It uses OAuth, so there’s no need to enter your username or password as long as you’re already signed into twitter.com. Give them an email address, and your tweets start backing up immediately. (See their FAQ about a possible limitation of 3200 tweets.)
2. Once TweetBackup is done grabbing all your tweets (it took about 2 minutes for my ~1,400 tweets), go to the Export tab, and save the RSS format to your local drive
3. Install a fresh copy of WordPress somewhere on your server if you don’t want tweets intermingled with other WP content. In the Tools section of WordPress, use the built-in RSS importer to import the file you saved from TweetBackup.
4. Assuming you want WordPress to automatically grab each tweet from this point forward, install the Twitter Tools plugin, enter your Twitter credentials in its settings screen, and configure it to create a blog post for each of your tweets. (Turn off the option to tweet when a post is created from this blog so the universe doesn’t explode in some endless loop of repeating tweets and blog posts.)
5. Update: I made the WP theme files for my tweet archive available for download for anyone who’d like to use them wholesale or as a base for their own archive.
6. That’s it.

A few extra steps, if you’re up for them

1. Twitter Tools will handle future tweets correctly. But the format of each tweet from TweetBackup starts with a prefix of your Twitter username, followed by a space and a colon, like this: “stop: Clicking through the new design of…”. I used the Search Regex plugin to search for and eliminate that prefix.
2. Past tweets from TweetBackup won’t have linked URLs. The Autolink URI plugin can do this for you automatically.
3. If you’re good enough with regular expressions, you can also use the Search Regex plugin to link up any @mentions and #hashtags in your tweets. I suck at regex, so I cheated and used some of the patterns from David Walsh within the Search Regex search/replace UI. Technically, you could probably use David’s first pattern to link up URLs too.
4. A few WP plugins can enhance the built-in search functionality of WordPress. I’m using Search Everything.
5. WP Super Cache will keep server resources to a minimum and help load pages quickly once they’re cached.
6. If you’re really up for it, you can customize the templates and design as I did. Anything is possible if you’re familiar with PHP and WordPress templates. For instance, you could try using the Similar Posts plugin to suggest possibly related tweets on the permalink page.

Now, every tweet you’ve written and will write can be duplicated and backed up in your own MYSQL database, accessible via a WordPress front end. Technically, you could probably use any blogging platform or CMS to do this. (It doesn’t require WordPress.) You’ll just need a means to import old tweets and automatically grab new tweets.

As messages sent via Twitter cannot be longer than 140 characters, they cannot be copyrighted. However original, witty, or profound they may be, nothing more than good manners protects your original expression of authorship. If you wish to let other people quote or use your Tweets, you need not “license” them; indeed, technically, you cannot license them, since they are in the public domain the instant you publish them.

link