Some recent news coverage on digg has prompted some “that’s not the same for me!” type responses; just because you don’t have a house full of video equipment doesn’t mean you don’t have something worth stealing, maybe you don’t live alone or you house isn’t empty when you tweet, would you want your loved ones put at risk?

The most secure approach would be not to tweet… but where’s the fun in that? … another step is to not post location based tweets… “this laptop is running slow” … doesn’t give anything away, I might be at home, I might not…. a lot of old-skool tweeters always recommend counting to 10 before hitting send (similar to the sleep on blog concept) to ensure that your current mood is appropriate for the web.

So now we come to why I’m posting, in the same way we obscure / hide information about what services we run on our computers / networks, is there a way to obscure the time at which we tweet? Well the tweet time will always be there – that’s what twitter wants – but the content is up to us. I propose a last week hash tag – #lastweek - this tag suggests that the status isn’t now, it happened at some point in the past.

Of course this approach is no more effective than leaving the light on when you leave the house, but it does add some uncertainty… if my living room light is on it could be because I’m sat in there, or it could be because I left the light on when I went to the restaurant… if I tweet “#lastweek meal at Joes rocked!” it suggests I’m not at Joes and where I am now is debatable.

What’s interesting is that as with all things on the internet, this idea isn’t original; there are posts tagged like this already, I wonder if these status’s really did happen last week? With this is mind I wonder what my next tweet will be? “#lastweek blogging” maybe?

To solve the problem attached is a small plugin for Alex Kings Twitter Tools, it’s a simple WordPress filter which prepends posts which begin with “is” with the author name, example:

is testing his new WP plugin.

becomes

Nick is testing his new WP plugin.

If I get some positive feedback I might publish this in WP’s plugin directory.

Installation is easy, rename twitter-tools-is.txt to twitter-tools-is.php and save it in your wp-content/plugins directory, enable the plug-in the “normal” way and job done, no further configuration required!

Twitter has been in a lot of main stream media recently, and I’ve noticed that it appears to be becoming a popular replacement for RSS, many non-technicals just don’t “get” RSS but it appears that twitter is providing an alternative source of keeping up with news… rather than just answering the social question “what are you doing?” .

My blog will always have the most interesting content….. of course the definition of interesting is up for debate…. but in an attempt to reach out to those using twitter to follow blogs & news I’ve created another twitter account @linickxfeed; This second account is simply tweeting when I create blog posts… I’m not sure of the etiquette, should tweets from people be mixed with auto-magic stuff from blogs?

Hopefully this approach won’t cause to much confusion, and If it does I’ll just have to delete the account So….

• @linickx – Are twitterings from Me, feel free to follow, direct message, send messages to @linickx and anything else you can think of.
• @linickxfeed – Is a BOT, feeding from linickx.com not a person, follow only.

1. Create a new twitter account, something like “mymonitbot” and make the feed private.
2. Set your “normal” twitter account to follow “mymonitbot”
3. Now signup for an account with twittermail and give them mymonitbot’s credentials.
4. Edit /etc/monit.conf, and change set alert to your new twittermail e-mail address
   If necessary edit monit’s message layout
5. restart monit

After a few seconds you’ll get a tweet from your monit bot saying that monit was re-started

To improve things I’ve changed how often I check twitter, you can do the same by editing the plugin file (wordpress/wp-content/plugins/twitter-tools/twitter-tools.php), see below for a code snippet…


function tweet_download_interval() {
#return 1800;
return 14400;
}

Enjoy!

I started the idea along time ago when photomatt introduced asides, i.e. I’ve always had categories and different front page presentation styles for blog posts, firefox posts, delicious posts and then everything else… so I’m thinking about taking the idea further by creating individual posts,feeds and styles for delicious links and rss shared items (from google reader).

Since I want to keep my feed clean (it’s imported into many social networks like mugshot & facebook) I’ve used this post to filter out my new “sync” category… sync as in I’m synchronising my web life with my website – Oh Yeah before I foget don’t add the code to functions.php as it creates a php warning, create a wordpress plugin.

My web/work/social life is quite busy – who’s isn’t!… so I’m a little worried about how to style the whole thing I found a nice way of quote text with css, so the tweets look good, but I’m worried that bookmarks and shared posts could make the site look cluttered or confusing, I’ve already had to add a “twitter reply” link to each post since the 1st thing people have asked me is what’s twitter.. doh must be a UK web-ignorance thing.

I guess we’ll just see how this pan’s out, I’ve just renewed this domain, so it’d be nice to finish for the domains birthday