Results tagged “Twitter”

I have been very busy, what with my professorial duties, and making the Pet Labour Troll, and building my new house. But today I can at least spend a little time trying to finish coding this blog. To which end, I have just added some scripting that posts every new entry to my Twitter feed. If it works (and it ought to work), there will be a brand new status update as soon as I submit this entry, that says, “blogged on seangleeson.com: ‘And now, my blog posts to Twitter’” (because that is the title of this entry) along with a shortened URL.

Of course, there are myriad services and plugins already extant that do pretty much exactly the same thing. But just as with my Facebook app, the hangup there is the “pretty much” part. None of them does exactly what I wanted, with the wording I wanted, or my desired algorithm for shortening the text if it exceeds 140 characters. This one is just what I wanted. (Phoebe too, I think.) And using my own script means I can use my own URL shortener as well.

So now, all y’all who follow my Twitter feed (I believe there were five of you, last I checked) never need to miss a blog post!

As I mentioned, an English political blogger, one Anna Raccoon, had commissioned me to make a shiny new British version of my rusty old Autorantic Virtual Moonbat (AVM). The new robot is now built, and I am heartily sorry to introduce you to the Pet Labour Troll (PLT).

Just as with the AVM, the PLT comes in both a chat module, which lets you talk to the robot, and a smaller sidebar module, which does not.

And just as with the prior incarnation, the PLT lets anyone put either module on any website with just a line of code.

But the Pet Labour Troll also incorporates many improvements over the old AVM, using technology which was not available back in 2004. The PLT is coded in ActionScript 3 and PHP 5, making it twice as fast. And it has three things the AVM never had: its own domain, its own Facebook page, and its own Twitter feed.

The domain, labourtroll.com, has all the instructions for embedding the robot on your own website.

The Facebook page posts rants from the troll at random intervals, and the troll will reply to any posts written on its “wall.” After its first day of operation, the page has garnered 29 fans on Facebook. I expect this number to go higher.

And the Twitter page, at twitter.com/labourtroll, has its own feed of random ranting as well.

I’m sure you will join me in extending our British cousins our sincere sympathy, as they come to know the horror that is the Pet Labour Troll.