Russell Beattie

So I took a few minutes and went into the code of my custom news reader (which, again, is hosted on my server written in PHP) to see how much effort it would be to tweak the results a bit like I wrote about in my last post. Happily, I was already saving the Atom/RSS "author" field into my database, and also happily, Twitter provides that information, so re-grouping and displaying my feeds "By User" ended up being pretty trivial.

You can see from the screenshot above, that the tweets are now organized per person who posted them, in chronological order. They're also "grepped" for links and @replies as well, and the paragraphs are condensed a bit to make them easy to scan. So even though I haven't checked out Twitter all day, I've included 100 updates per page, so it'll actually only take me a few minutes to scroll through the posts and catch up. The people I care more about get a bit more attention, the rest I can breeze by.

Seems to work well so far - separating off the microblog updates from my regular news reading habits definitely seems like the way to go. Once I get things refined a bit more I'll post the code in case anyone is interested.

:-)

-Russ