IMS_Blog

Quite often I’ll be sat and think of something that doesn’t quite make it into the blog because it’s simply too much effort to make a whole post for something like one sentence. If it’s just an interesting web page the link might get thrown up in Links of the Moment but even that isn’t effort free.

The other thing I realised was that I wanted a simple way to add tasks to Remember The Milk. There are a number of services which integrate with RTM. IMified was tempting but given the first point Twitter seemed a more useful choice (Twitter of course supports posting by instant messaging anyway, so I wasn’t losing out on that).

So with Twitter set up so I could add things to RTM I began to look at using it for the purpose it’s actually designed, hence the page topping bar. You won’t find “Eating breakfast” banality in there, but those little things I think of and post off hand.

A Few More Details

In case your wondering about the entire process… Whilst I could use IM to add posts to Twitter, I’m actually using a command line interface. I can call that using Slickrunner. As adding to RTM simply involves sending a direct Twitter message I can also easily add tasks via Slickrunner (incidently, I tend to invoke Slickrunner using a double tap of the control key thanks to TapTap Hotkey Extender)

The Quick Thoughts bar itself is produced by a quickly knocked up perl script, which parses the RSS feed from Twitter (they do supply a simple way to include stuff but I wanted more control—particularly to not be reliant on javascript).

Adjustment: I changed the perl script slightly to transform &lt; and &gt; back into < and > so I can do basic HTML in the posts. Of course that HTML won’t work in the feed or the actual Twitter page so I’m not sure about it. Then again, this whole thing is very experimental.

Then Again:Scrap that. The only thing I’m ever likely to want to code up will be a link and that’s allowed anyway (gets converted to a TinyURL after a certain length. So now the script just makes sure any URL present actually gets turned into a link here…