The Raw Prawn

I’ve been benefitting from using open software of all sorts for years. While I have been active on discussion forums for some projects, I have never actually contributed any code…until now! It’s hardly the most sophisticated bit of coding, but it’s a contribution, which gives me a wam fuzzy glow.

I’ve been playing around with the StatusNet microblogging software for a while (the software behind identi.ca), running a discussion forum called the Mule Stable. One of the big challenges I’ve found running a microblog is managing spam. These days the big sites like twitter and identi.ca live with the fact that spammers will get onto their sites and rely on users blocking and reporting them. What this means is that the public timelines of these sites tends to have a lot of spammers in them. However, since not many people bother to visit the public timelines, this is not much of a problem. It’s only when the spammers start using @ replies that they can get really annoying.

However, for the Stable, the user-base is still small enough that most people would just read the public timeline and so spammers are very obvious when they appear. Putting in a recaptcha distorted word question cut out quite a few spammers, and requiring email validation cut out some more, but there were some that still got through…a lot of them Russian for some reason. So, I wrote a simple plugin for StatusNet which “sandboxes” new users by default. This means that while they can still register and post messages, these posts do not appear on the public timeline, so only people subscribing to them (initially no-one!) would see the posts. I can then un-sandbox legitimate users.

This is a fairly manual process, so would not be feasible for large sites, but since I thought it would be very useful for other people running small sites, I sent what I’d done back to the developers. It has now made it into the 0.9.x of StatusNet!

StatusNet is a great initiative and so it feels good to give something back, if only in a very small way.

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The tight 140 character contraint imposed by Twitter imposes an economy of style that has proved a strong stimulus to abbreviation conventions. The most successful, of course, has been the @ reply, so much so that many people assume that Twitter invented it themselves, when it was in fact invented by users and then officially adopted. The hashtag (#) ranks next in importance, but after than the conventions quickly become less universal. Even the venerable “RT” for re-tweets has been the subject of some controversy.

One intriguing development has been an attempt to develop an “official” Twitter abbreviation syntax. The result is called “nanoformats”, since it comes with the imprimateur of microformat.org but is even shorter. It does seem horribly ambitious to make anything official, unless you own Twitter and it’s all a bit too ugly for me with its heavy use of colons. But I wish them luck.

In the meantime, I’ve been using a different set of conventions that I first came across last year in a blog post by Chris Messina. Chris is more modest than the nanoformat crew and explains his reason for writing up the syntax quite simply:

Well, I never expect that anyone will follow my lead, but if they do, I’d like to spell out what I’m doing so they can more or less get it right.

I thought I’d give them ago and they’ve stuck with me. I like them, so here they are in case you’ve ever wondered what I mean by them:

/via

This is used after quoting someone (usually on twitter, but not necessarily). Rather than reviving the RT versus via controversy linked to above, I use this alongside RT. I will only use RT for a full and exact quote, but allow minor editorial liberties (e.g. correcting spelling or … elision) and maybe some additional commentary with a /via. Here’s an example:

Might take a look at this: Complete first chapter of my new book Web Analytics 2.0 is here: http://zqi.me/8YmTeI /via @avinashkaushik

(here’s the original tweet).

/cc

These days the “@ reply” has morphed into the “@ mention” and it is very handy for getting a few people to see a tweet. The /cc tag is used if you are replying to one person but want to copy some others in too.

@engin_eer Waleed Ali is quite good, but with Miranda and Peter, it won’t be much fun. #qanda /cc @franksting

/by

When linking to an article or post by someone, this is a handy way to attribute it.

“Mule Stable demo video” http://bit.ly/bZVIOF /by @stubbornmule

Of course, there are plenty of other ways to do this and some are even very similar (e.g. cc/ instead of /cc), but these work for me.

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I recently discovered these instructions for accessing identi.ca using the Tweetie 2 iPhone app. Since the Mule Stable is built on the same software as indenti.ca, the technique works just as well as a way of checking and posting messages on the Mule Stable. Here’s how (the steps match the sceenshots):

1. Go you your Accounts page on Tweetie 2 (press whatever button you see on the top left until you get there!) and press the + button in the top right.
2. Enter your Mule Stable username and password and then press the picture of a cog (the settings button).
3. In the “API Root” field enter http://stable.stubbornmule.net/api (for identi.ca you would enter https://identi.ca/api, but I don’t have an SSL login for the Mule Stable yet). The press “Add Account (top left).
4. You should see your Mule Stable account in the account list. Select it and you will see your Personal messages (you cannot see the public timeline as far as I know).Enjoy! Even geo-location should work.

There are a few caveats:

• If your Mule Stable (or identi.ca) username is the same as your twitter username, you may experience strange behaviour. Worst case, you will not be able to authenticate as that user and you will have to delete it from the account list in Tweetie 2 and add it again.
• Similarly, sometimes if you look at someone’s profile in the Stable and they have the same username as someone you follow on Twitter, it may display the Twitter profile instead of the Stable profile.
  
• Search any various other features do not work at the moment.
• Although the notice limit on the Stable is 200 characters, Tweetie 2 will not let you enter more than the standard 140 characters.
  

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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