TechTicker
educational technology, eLearning & emerging technology

I don’t link to Twitter updates nearly as much as I used to - largely because I’m not using Twitter as much as I used to - but one of the headaches of doing so was always how best to reference them. Yes, each update has its own permalink and you can include it as a URL in the post, but given how short Twitter updates are I always felt doing that was wasting the readers’ time.

Alternatively, you could also also just reference the update in its entirety - they are at most only 140 characters after all - but I didn’t like doing that either as I’ve been taught to cite my source and include as much information as possible.

By way of Liz Kolb (lkolb on Twitter), I’ve just become aware of a neat little tool that solves the issue.

Known as TweetPaste, this application enables you to convert the URL of any Twitter update into an embeddable piece of code that, when rendered on screen, closely resembles each update’s unique permalink view as seen Twitter.

Using Liz’s original update as an example, the code snippet would result in the following:

[tweet=858552822]

(NB: The link to TweetPaste that Liz included in the update breaks because it’s not meant to have Paste at the end - just http://tweetpaste.net/)

This option is available either as a text field on the TweetPaste site (where the snippet is an i-frame), or as a WordPress plugin.

In the case of the WordPress plugin, bloggers need only follow these directions:

1. Download the plugin
2. Unzip the contents and upload to your /wp-content/plugins folder.
3. Activate the TweetPaste plugin
4. To get the ID of a tweet, read the string of numbers from the end of the tweet URL.
5. Start writing your post, then just type [tweet=x], where x is the ID of the tweet you want to post.
6. Publish and marvel!

The result is an official looking reference to a Twitter update, which includes links to the Twitter user’s profile, how they submitted the update (in this case from the website) as well as links to Twitter users they were sending the update to. Interestingly it doesn’t reference the permalink of the update - the time sent is left as static text.

Having said that, a quick glance at The TweetPaste Weblog indicates the developer is open to feedback on “what features you want added.” Perhaps I’ll suggest they add clickable permalinks.

Wordle is a simple yet visually interesting tool I ran across recently, which enables users to create word clouds based on provided content. As the site explains:

“The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.”

It’s an entertaining tool to use as the application randomises font style, colour, word location, and cloud shape each time you click “Randomize.” I spent ages experimenting to see what would emerge from each new rendering.

Given my interest in expanding my understanding of learning styles I couldn’t help but wonder what type of learner Wordle would appeal to most; as well as right-brain leaning versus left-brain leaning. If anybody has thoughts on this please let me know.

As a bit of fun I’m including two of the word clouds I created below. Can you guess what the phrases are? I’ll give you a small hint: Wordle strips out punctuation by default, so there is meant to be some in there - in image one there’s a colon and a questionmark; image two has a colon and a period.