I have tweaked the blog…

I have tweaked the blog templates (this journal and all rss/atom feeds) to more informatively “title” the posts I share from Twitter (or at least conceal the real title with something else). Rather than “Briefly (via Twitter)”, what everyone should see instead are the first five words from the post itself; a prelude, if you will — a hint, a foreshadowing of the impending 140 characters of greatness.
Previewing the look myself, I find I like it quite a bit better (for differentiation between posts, if nothing else).
The only thing I can’t do is actually change the title of the post — I can only conceal it. That “title” value is immutable (due to the Twitter code itself) and will continue to crop up in certain places (such as the comments page and any email notifications that the blog sends out).

4 Replies to “I have tweaked the blog…”

  1. Ah! That makes … tremendous sense (I assume you’re using a conditional in the templates, including the RSS ones, then using the excerpt function). So, do you let the title sort of be a stream of consciousness (whatever the first five words are), do you carefully pick five words to start your Tweets with, or do you explicitly title your Tweets in a five-word phrase?
    (This is a clever idea — I just need to consider how I want to abscond with it.)

  2. Yes: conditionals in all the templates, which wasn’t nearly as difficult as it sounds), and “MTExcerpt words=”5″” (it defaults to 40, which is essentially the whole post) for the title. The five words selected are stream of consciousness.

  3. In return for your absconding, I might counter-abscond with the code you used to put the date in the ‘true’ title, just for some decent differentiation in the archives.

  4. Down in the place in the twitter.pl file where you change the other stuff, I have as the title line:
    $entry->title( $twitter_title . ‘ (at ‘ . jsondate2ts( $blog->id, $tweet->{created_at} ) . ‘)’ );

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