Be careful with your Follow friday

Every friday i see lovely awesome people handing off follow friday greets on twitter to their favourite people, its amazing and awesome. However I do also see the same mistake again and again!

If you prefix a message with an @username , then twitter sees this as a message TO that person, therefore this wont show up in anyones timeline except your own, and theirs, and anyone who follows you or them.

This means if you start your follow friday with a username then only you, and them, and anyone else mentioned in that tweet or following both of you will see it. It somewhat defeats the purpose of follow friday which is advertising people to watch.

I love to find new and interesting people to follow on Fridays, i don’t however often do them myself (ok so im lazy!) So in the interests of spammy follow fridays and great friendships, do the honerable thing and start your follow fridays with a #ff tag !:D

Hacking Tweeterwall to Autovote

Okay you may have seen my previous post which used a shell script to just vote every 20 seconds. Very simple, but they have got wise and now put a stop to that!

Tweeterwall is at http://tweeterwall.mallplace.com and is like a popularity contest. I got all my friends or people i knew into top 20, then we went into the continental (NZ and Aussies) at which point i had this setup to vote for all the NZ people, this way no Aussies got through into the finals (except one!).
We finally got into the World competitions at which point I really just couldn’t be buggered with it anymore, its no fun (shorter comps for people with low attention spans would be nice!). And secondly, I would get really beaten down if i beat Miley Cyrus by my 2 daughters! Hence why im making this post.

I’m not the first person to do this, im fairly sure, im just publicizing it so others can mess with it. So when  you see those people in the top of the polls, who only have only 30 odd followers and are kicking your butt, its not because you arn’t a cool person. its just that there isnt many ways to prevent people from doing this kind of thing.

Ideally they need to impliment some sort of statistics which checks what IP addresses are hitting what users and look for things like ‘never having a break’ (real people sleep!) and browser versions being different, time being an exact rather than random amount etc.  All of which can be faked with a few more lines of code anyway, but it will still make it hard enough that people wont bother with it.

After that i looked at Grease monkey and a co-worker came up some code that worked nicely. All you had to do was install the firefox Grease Monkey addon, then load this script and leave the browser open in a tab!

Grab this code, modify the URLs at the top to reflect the one you need, and edit your username near the bottom.

/ ==UserScript==
// @name Vote Velofille
// @namespace http://tweeterwall.mallplace.com/tw/new-zealand/ms-twitter
// @description Vote for Velofille
// @include http://tweeterwall.mallplace.com/tw/new-zealand/ms-twitter
// ==/UserScript==
var $;

// Add jQuery
var GM_JQ = document.createElement(“script”);
GM_JQ.src = “http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.min.js”;
GM_JQ.type = “text/javascript”;

document.body.appendChild(GM_JQ);

// Check if jQuery’s loaded
var checker=setInterval(function(){
if(typeof ($ = unsafeWindow.jQuery) != “undefined”) {
clearInterval(checker);
setTimeout(‘window.location.reload()’,1260000);
voteforperson();
}
},100);

function voteforperson() {
$(‘#velofille div.tweeter-vote > a’).click();
console.log(‘velofille voted’);
}

Save the file as something.user.js then open it with firefox. the file name must end in .user.js for Grease monkey to Pick it up.

So have fun with that, and go forth and hackery!

The @OfficeChair that twitters your farts!

It seems somebody REALLY wanted to invent something that twitters … everything! but without having to actually do so!

Twitter is supposed to happen in that space between Flickr posts and Facebook updates, in the space when life actually happens. Well, in the space of time “when life actually happens,” life actually happens. It is neither pretty nor ugly. It is just life. If Twitter is supposed to be a document of life as it happens, then it should really document life, indiscriminately, as it happens without interference. If it fails to do this, then life then becomes the space between “tweets” (Twitter posts).

Therefore, it is of the utmost importance, to be able to update Twitter with life events without actually interfering with the event themselves. The documentation of life, henceforth, needs to be automated.

That said, I decided the first part of life that needed to be documented was my daily flatulence at work. I am not going to lie, I am a gassy individual. Since my flatulence is a part of life, it would be fraudulent of me to document life as it happens without documenting these occurrences.

In keeping with the process of non-interference in daily activity, I have created an office chair to both detect and Twitter my flatulence without having to bother me to update it myself.

You can find the Instructable for his twittering fart chair here

You can follow his farting progress here