notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

Wireless

Going on the reaction to the staff post announcing Tumblr Wire, I’m the only person who took an instant dislike to it. It’s the worst of Radar, back. Where’s Recent / Popular / Upcoming gone? Bah. I demand a refund. (Yes, I know Tumblr’s free. That’s called irony. Or sarcasm. Or something.)

Having spent a little more time with it: I still hate it. That scrolling box has zero refindability. Good luck if you want to actually capture anything from it. You thought Twitter had the memory span of a goldfish? Man, that’s like writing in stone compared to this.

On the other hand, maybe I’m just not Tumblr’s desired audience. I write posts of more than two paragraphs; perhaps I should just give up and shuffle off to Posterous. Or ignore all the social crap beyond the Dashboard. At least then I’d only have one source of pseudo-meaningful bollocks.

Edit: Oh dear, it’s even worse. Links from the Wire go through the Digg-bar style tumblupon UI, which has nasty framesets stopping you from easily sharing stuff. Nasty.

Keyboard Navigation In Tumblr

For a while, I’ve had a small bit of JavaScript into the templates of notes.husk.org that enables vi/ffffound/Google Reader style navigation with the j and k keys. Hit ‘j’ and the page will scroll to the next entry; ‘k’ and it will move to the previous one. It even handles paging (well, paging with j, anyway).

It’s not very complicated code, and (unlike the code at ffffound) it doesn’t handle scrolling by the user (as opposed to itself) nicely; nor does it handle going backwards very well. Nonetheless, it’s better than nothing, and it’s surprisingly easy to add. So, here’s the code. (Note that you’ll want each of your divs to have the ‘tumblr’ class, or you’ll want to change the code to match your HTML.)

        var posts = $("div.tumblr"), idx = -1;
        $(document).keypress(function (e) {
          if (e.which != 106 && e.which != 107) {
            return;
          }
          if (e.which == 106) {
            if (idx < posts.length - 1) {
              idx++;
            } else {
              // find link to older page
              link = $('ul.nav li a:contains(older)').attr('href')
              if (link) {
                if (!link.match(/^http:/)) {
                  link = 'http://'+window.location.host+link;
                }
                location.href = link;
              }
            }
          }
          if (e.which == 107) {
            if (idx > 0) {
              idx--;
            } else {
              // find link to older page
              link = $('ul.nav li a:contains(newer)').attr('href')
              if (link) {
                if (!link.match(/^http:/)) {
                  link = 'http://'+window.location.host+link;
                }
                location.href = link;
              }
            }
          }
          var top = $(posts[idx]).offset().top+1;
          window.scrollTo(0, top);        

(This was posted somewhat as a response to Aza Raskin’s post about keyboard navigation and implementing it with Greasemonkey. However, I agree with the commenters: ffffound sets the bar for this (and my code is, as I’ve said, nowhere near as good), and I find the scrolling jarring. I think I also prefer the use of j/k not the arrow keys, because users have expectations of the latter.)

Microplaza: a micro-review

While idly surfing Twitter search trends, I noticed a Techchrunch article on MicroPlaza was a trending topic. I was intrigued, as I’d been considering ways of getting links out of Twitter for months, and I managed to get an invite code and have a quick look around.

MicroPlaza shows all the links that have been posted by people I follow, with any URL shortening expanded out. The main page of the service is the timeline view (which, as you see, can be shared with others). I think the best comparison is with my delicious network page, which shows a similar sort of information, but makes some different - and, to me, preferable - decisions.

Firstly, the MicroPlaza view includes a screengrab. This has the potential to be quite informative, but it also takes up a lot of space. Magnolia (RIP) used to do something similar, and I think it’s part of the reason I never used the service in anger- I want something like this to be quite information dense.

Secondly, the delicious view doesn’t do any deduping- if ten of my network post a link, it shows up ten times, in the order they posted it. In contrast, MicroPlaza shows each link complete with a list of all the twitter users who’ve posted it, which is a nice idea, but it can also mean that I can’t always see which of my contacts actually posted it. There is an “expand” button, but it’s a bit of a pain to have to use it (and wait for the twitterers to be fetched) before finding the person.

Personally I’d love to see options to lose the screengrab, and to improve the visibility of the people I follow. (I don’t really care about the rest of Twitter, except possibly as a source of statistical ‘everyone is interested in this’ information.)

MicroPlaza uses the still-in-beta OAuth support to allow posting, which is good (and avoids the password antipattern). However, it doesn’t use the same support to pull out links from people you follow who keep their updates private (such as, well, me). As Tom pointed out on IRC, privacy makes the entire site a lot harder to build:

they’d also then end up with storing your replies once for everyone who followed you, or just once and having to very closely track the twitter follow network to not leak privacy everywhere

Still, for all my quibbles, this really is a lot better than the previous Twitter URL services, like twitturly, which surface popular links across the network, rather than the stuff I actually care about. When a service comes along that’s denser, and includes (and respects) private updates, I can see myself using it a great deal. For now, MicroPlaza looks handy for catching up when I’m too busy to read every tweet and follow every link.