Mat Bowles

I like Twitter. It's nice, quick and effective, and allows for quick thoughts or short public discussions that can crossover with others. That there are MPs sometimes sat in the House of Commons listening to debates and reading Twitter means I can, if necessary, pass information on nice and easily. Not done it yet, but it might happen.

I also like sharing links and stuff on Twitter, and having my Twitter posts (but not replies) transfer to both my Facebook status and as daily digests. As I'd just stopped doing linkspams and can't be bothered to fix the code, I'm temporarily doing all my links through Twitter as well, it suits me.

I like reading others Twitter digests, ported through LoudTwitter, on my friends listReading Page. I personally dislike it when they're cut, as it stops me doing a quick scan and I'm not likely to open the cut text up as it takes too long. If I don't want to read, I can scroll past.

Given that I like having LoudTwitter posts on my friends page, I've added some code to my journal to make them look a lot better than the default. This is Good.

But I also know that some people, poor misunderstanding types that they are, dislike seeing Twitter posts, completely. Given that some people seem to insist on crossposting all their Tweets, including their halves of ongoing conversations that make little sense, I can understand this, but it's better to just get such people to turn off the option of importing replies, as redatt explains.

But, for those of you that really don't want to read Loudtwitter posts on their friends page, and for those of you that want to enhance the Loudtwitter posts that appear on theirs, I thought I'd share some code.

My enhancement code:
.loudtwitter { background:#000000; colour:#dddddd; -moz-border-radius: 10px; -webkit-border-radius: 10px; border-radius: 10px; list-style: square; } .loudtwitter li { padding-bottom: 5px; border-bottom: 1px dotted; } .loudtwitter li em { color:#ee5; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; } .loudtwitter li em:after { content: "- "; }
And some removal code if you really want it:
.loudtwitter { display: none!important }
Note, I coded it in twenty seconds, it's a simple CSS trick, it only removes the list of tweets, not the whole post, and it was really easy.

To use either, all you need to do is go to CustomCSS on LJ or DW and copy/paste it in
http://www.livejournal.com/customize/options.bml?group=customcss
http://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/options.bml?group=customcss

For those of you that have got into the habit of cutting your tweet imports because some friends wanted it? If they don't want to see them, link them here. Because I'd much rather see them, and helping everyone make their tweets look pretty makes sense to me. Anyone that wants the colours changed to suit their background, feel free to comment.

Those of you using the usericon replacement code I mentioned here may find this comment (and the follow on thread) by the always helpful burr86 of use:

Aha. Modify your code -- every time there's a "padding" statement, make it "padding: (whatever) !important"? Now that I dig into it, we added a little padding next to the lj user icon, and your CSS is conflicting with ours.

I've got ma Daleks back--I'm updating my previous post now.

Well, to be more specific, I did a lot of trial and error copy/pasting my CSS, and think the problem is the large amount of /* comment */ text there was in there. As anyone that codes CSS will know, commenting on your markup is dead useful when you come back to it cold after a few months. But by judicious removal of most of it, I've both got the appearance back the way I like it and made a few minor improvements (especially to the way comments display).

Not going to bother hacking in and sorting out the tagcloud now, might do eventually but, y'know, bigger things to worry about. Can't find anything in the LJ FAQ saying why they're now stripping out CSS with large comment texts, that's a really strange decision to make. Ah well.

( Silly quiz: Smut novel character )Can't really argue with that one...

I love my LJ layout. I like the colour scheme, I like the friends page, I like the 3-column view, the tag cloud.

Unfortunately, it handles very long threaded conversations incredibly badly. On the one hand, comments=good, we like comments. On the other, a large chunk of text crammed into a comment an inch wide is just silly.

Gah! I can always append ?format=light, but that disappears after a comment is made, so you get the narrow column again. Ah well, back to a redesign of some sort I guess :-(

Maybe later. Much later. Maybe I'll just export everything earlier than planned. Oh, I dunno. My flat appointment for tonight got bumped to tomorrow, so I've got nowt to do, Mike's at a leaving do. Hmm, broadband. YouTube. I'll watch YouTube. And maybe some of ginasketch's stuff.

London lunch tomorrow?

Anyone want to meet up for lunch in town tomorrow? Or indeed Saturday?

This is my 501st post, apparently. That's to LJ, not on all the other places I've started writing since I signed up for this thing. nadriel? In the unlikely event that liberty_central actually works, or gets somewhere at all? It's your fault y'git, you got me writing again.

Unfortunately, I can't break my writers block. I need the inaugaral "real" article for voting_taktix, but it won't flow. "Tactical voting is a myth", on a site dedicated to tactical voting? Yay for contradictions.

Also, nicked from someone else's LJ (look, I click on the profiles of cute girls who put themselves in userpics, ok? Anyone here not do that?):

9/9 Genius You are 78% knowledgable and 96% intellectual.

Amazing! You have an incredible brain (intellect) and a powerhouse of information (knowledge)! Keep up the impressive work-- we all bow to you.

( Tell me something I didn't know... )

( Why I'm unique )

Tomorrow? Exeter, if I get up, to play silly game's at Steve's with Peter Pig. If I wake up. Oh, I also need to clean and tidy the flat, as it'll be the last chance between now and when I get back from nadriel's. Two weeks holiday in one month? Yay! Must remember to buy tickets for those events.

Also, on the quiz thing? A few of the questions are US specific. Sorry, but knowing which Amendment does not isn't a History question, it's a Constitutional Theory and practice Q. I mean, I got that answer right anyway, but, y'know, I would've got a better score if the questions weren't aimed at one populace. Cos I is ded smart, see?

As of one hour, ten minutes ago as I type this, I officially became 32 years old. Do I care? Not really. Do I have any special plans? Well, I've got the week off, so, well, I'm meeting Mum for lunch tomorrow, and going to visit Granny Wednesday, which'll be cool, haven't been to Slapton for ages.
( Lunch with the 'rents )
( A walk though the village, a chat with Dad )
( Shopping for books )
( Gaming at Rob's )

Then home, to check messages, post this, catch up with some memes I've been storing up, then turn in.

Memes and quizzes

I did a mindmap. It's too wide to display properly for the 3-column layout, so here's the link. When I say "I did a mindmap", what I mean is I aske them for one and gave them my email address about 6 months ago, and got the reply last week. Meh, it's free, so de nada.


( What Goth am I? )

( West Wing Character )

New layout

Also? I switched to the new Expressive Vox theme layout. Huge advantage is that the html is very clean and everything has a nicely defined class, so I can style each element. A numpty like me has managed to personalise my journal fairly well. Nowhere near finished, but it works. Tag cloud, page summary, profile, all fairly good. I did go through and delete a huge pile of one-use only tags to make the cloud look almost respectable. Now all I need is to learn how to make banners look good. Or ask someone for one, want to use the same one for here, my MySpace and possibly the column at TaKtiX.

Well, I was bored, ran out of things to browse, read every news story that looked interesting, used my first ever Slashdot mod points, so decided to play around with my LJ settings.

Look: matgb

( What I've done with my journal )

Can people say if they have problems with it and if so which browser they use? It's an error in an LJ approved layout, so I'll need to harass them to fix it, but it would be good to know; alternately, it might just be my crappy PC acting up.