Month: July 2010

Using Tweepml to Manage your Twitter Contacts and do away with #ff and #tt

  1. In January 2009 I complained how slow the Twitter interface is.
  2. Not much has changed since then for the better, especially since Twitter took away their pagination of tweets and from followers and following. Until then you could at least figure out where you had to look by fiddling a bit with their pagination. Now you have to wade through window after window.
  3. Looking up an old tweet it is also difficult, because there is a limit of (I believe) 3200 tweets the Twitter API allows you to look up. Unfortunately the way around that Storytlr has ceased to exist and changed into a community project that I have not been able to figure out yet
  4. If you want to look up a contact it’s not easy, especially if you don’t remember the exact name of who you are looking for. In January 2009, as proliferate list maker, I had set out to manually compose such list of my contacts and incorporate it here on a page to be able to look up a contact quickly by Avatar. Also I want such contact list alphabetically organized. I dicontinued that a year ago, because it was too cumbersome to do manually. In addition I got more and more followers.
  5. Fortunately, in the meantime Twitter has introduced Twitter Lists and Tweepml is building on that
  6. Although I do like the #ff and #tt principle, it annoyes me no end to see everybody doing nothing more than reiterating their love, which in my view is boring and a waste of twitterspace. Therefor it is ideal to make a couple of niche lists on Tweepml and give them #ff or #tt love. For your followers it is less cumbersome and if they want to, they can in one click follow your entire list if they want
  7. I myself am still in the process of curtailing the number of tweeps I follow. Especially since I use twitter on my mobile…the more tweeps you follow the more cluttered your mobile can get.

How to do it?

I had to delete this section, because after being banned by Twitter at a certain stage, Tweepml has been struggling to get their act together and get allowed by Twitter. Late 2011 it seemed they had succeeded, but somewhere in March 2012 I noticed they have disappeared completely. I think this is sad as they had a great service….

 

Last edited by GJE on March 11, 2012 at 1:41 pm

 

Street Art (17): Will You Marry Me?

Graffiti Proposal from PR!MO on Vimeo.

A very poetic way of posing the question:-)

New project: Absolutely The Hague!

I started a new site, Absolutely The Hague! together with Lisa Rouissi (@Koffiekitten) and hopefully many other contributors.

The reason is – and off course I’m biased – The Hague is an excellent city to work in, to live in and an excellent city to visit. I just want to tell this to the world out there in the English language.

Moreover The Hague has a huge SEO problem. It is known by at least four different names:

  1. It’s original name is ‘s-Gravenhage,
  2. It’s common name is Den Haag
  3. The English speaking world knows it as The Hague and
  4. The French know it as La Haye

so it ain’t easy to find on Google. I want to try to change that with the help of a couple of locals and expats who live and work in The Hague and love it like I do. Finally there are many good sites about The Hague, but they are in Dutch only….

The “Karate Kids” – Chris Pearson (Thesis) vs Matt Mullenweg (WordPress): 0-1 So Far

Picture by Daniel Larusso

Beware! This might be time consuming!

Yesterday I opened my dashboard and noticed syn-thesis-1 by Matt Mullenweg in a window – It’s a prerogative of some WordPress developers to have their posts in one of the WordPress dashboard windows.

Matt Mullenweg (@PhotoMatt) is the guy behind WordPress, the blogging platform software I use here.

Chris Pearson (@Pearsonified) is the guy behind the Thesis Theme that I use here.

Matt was referring to an audio stream of nearly an hour, kindly put together by Mixergy who tried to bring the two closer together.

To get a bit perspective and background you could consider to look at this interview of Chris by Mixergy (@AndrewWarner).

There is another connected read in a post #thesiswp by Jane Wells @Janeforshort, an Automattic member.

You can reed Tweets about it in the #thesiswp stream.

Chris “addressed” the matter without going into details of the dispute itself in an earlier post Solutions and Ideology

Unfortunately in the audio stream neither party clearly stipulates the issue.

What’s it all about?

WordPress is bound by the GNU GPL License.

Jane explained the issue to me in the comments to her post:

The uber-simple version: the WordPress license states that derivative code (based on WordPress, using WordPress core functions, etc) inherits the GPL license and must retain the user freedoms that the WordPress license guarantees. Chris uses WordPress code (in some cases directly copied and pasted from WordPress core), but is not following the rule of the WordPress license, and is instead releasing his Thesis theme under a restrictive license, which takes away the user freedoms that the WordPress license exists to guarantee. Basically, developing on WordPress has one rule by the license agreement: you can take our code for free and build on it, but any work that comes out of that and is publicly distributed must be made available for modification and redistribution just like WordPress itself. Chris doesn’t like that rule because the second part of it would allow other people to build on his work, and he doesn’t want them to be able to. So he takes advantage of the first part of the rule, and violates the second.

It is not about the money

Jane further explained:

As has been stated many times (and is in the license itself), the GPL issue comes into play with public distribution. If you create a theme for your own use and don’t distribute it at all, license isn’t an issue. If you create a work for hire for a client you should deliver the source code to them (which you do when you deliver the theme), but you do not need to append a license to it b/c you are simply delivering work for hire. Only when you engage in public distribution (make it available publicly via the web or other delivery mechanism, whether paid or free) do you need to think about the license. At that point, yes, your PHP theme code needs to be GPL, but you can license your images and CSS under whatever license you like in order to protect the intellectual property of your designs.

Why 0-1?

Listening through the audio interview with Matt I concluded Chris was angry. He wasn’t drunk as he stated somewhere on Twitter. He shouldn’t have been angry. By loosing his temper he lost it. He clearly didn’t make a cohesive case. The end of the story is that he dared Matt to sue him. I’m not sure a judge from behind his desk would be able to solve the matter in a way the community could live with.

Matt kept his calm and announced another weapon: He offers Thesis users to buy them a GPL compliant premium theme.

I might consider to take Matt up on that offer.

On another note: Is it mere coincidence that Matt chimes in after WordPress 3.0 was released that has many features and functionalities Thesis offered long before 3.0 was launched?

Update
The issue intrigues me from various points of view. Especially the fact that both characters are behaving more like trolls than sensible people.

I’m collecting some links here for further reading:

  • In themes are GPL too Matt posted a (part of?) a Software Freedom Law Center opinion on the matter already back in July 2009. Here he goes over the boundary in my view:

    • Even though graphics and CSS aren’t required to be GPL legally, the lack thereof is pretty limiting. Can you imagine WordPress without any CSS or javascript? So as before, we will only promote and host things on WordPress.org that are 100% GPL or compatible. To celebrate a few folks creating 100% GPL themes and providing support and other services around them, we have a new page listing GPL commercially supported themes.

  • WordPress Them Licensing by Ryan Boren (@Rboren), on the WP side
  • Thesis War summary by Ben Cook (@Skitzzo), on the Thesis side
  • A thoughtful article why the GPL does not affect a theme Why the GPL does not apply to Premium WordPress themes
  • A further collection of links on the subject: 32 WordPress Thesis and GPL links to help you formulate your own opinion
  • Matt Mullenweg Fouls his nest
  • @FrederickDing has a pleasantly insightful take on the matter in Tracking the ThesisWP matter

More to follow…

Another Happy Hotelier at TED – Quote of the Day (17)


Chip Conley, the Joye de Vivre Hotel brand owner, shares how happiness influences his business. He quotes Einstein: “Not everything that counts in life can be counted“