developar

First of all, sorry for the unintended spam on Twitter on my friends’ time-line Yesterday’s night (it wasn’t that much spam, but sorry anyway) where it all began and here is the reason why:

Months ago, I began to use those “Read It Later” services which let you pin any link and keep it for later to read it when you have a free time. Works perfectly on the articles that pops during the day. I wasn’t relying on those services much until I seriously organized my feeds and got the best sources of the news I actually care about. When interesting articles which cannot be missed began to stack, not a news but seriously good articles and useful contents which you can’t just do it the “mark as read” way in Google Reader.

Anyhow, after giving a good time to the few alike services I decided to go with Instapaper (which is not the point in this post to explain why but let’s just say they are the best! he is?) of course if you use the service as much as I do, you can’t but buy the 4.99$ pro version of the app for the iPhone and the iPad.

And if you were following my tweets recently, you will notice that I began to share more interesting links, thanks to the connection feature between Instapaper and Twitter which will post any article the same moment I hit “like” under it (unless I was offline which will do the same the moment I go online).

BUT THE THING THAT BURNED MY NERVES IS: Instapaper appends this to your tweet: “(via Instapaper)” !!! I couldn’t believe it when I saw it! Instapaper is just the service laying between the original website and me, so when I wanted to share something from that website, Instapaper is out of the equation!!! And more I couldn’t believe it when I saw that you can’t alter this from the settings or anywhere, so I had to improvise. And so what I did: I wrote a script that will monitor my tweets 24/7 and immediately destroy any tweet with the “(via Instapaper)” phrase and rewrite the original tweet without it. So now what you can see is only a good and clean tweets.

Here is an example of how the original twets looks like:

And here it is after chopping off the “(via Instapaper)” :

That I did “on the go” Yesterday, I didn’t even bother to test from another account like @devilopar so to warm-up my dusty functions that communicate with Twitter, I let the script run and tweet on my behalf a random things like “Tweet Tweet” whenever I get a successful authorized connection to Twitter which I was deleting immediately but thanks to the “Stream API” supported clients such as TweetDeck, people were able to see my testing tweets immediately even though I was deleting them after a seconds :D but nobody was upset, reversely, tweeps showed how cool they are! they started responding to my tweets with a similar funny tweets like :

Why this is important? because if you noticed, the links I add to Instapaper, are mostly important, therefore when I like something from those, a big chance that my friends will probably like it too. It is the digest of my daily readings. Think of it like this: If I have about 5OO items from my feeds, I’ll have about 2O items to be read later so if I liked 4 or 5 items, a big chance that those are excellent links. 5OO > 2O > 5

A friend suggested that why don’t I make it a public service? of course there aren’t a lot of people who are obsessed with Instapaper or Reading things late like me, but seriously I would do it if at least one person is suffering (suffering !!!) from this too. So according to the feedback, I will be studying it although I don’t know if O have the authority to do something like this that may harm Instapaper’s terms of services but I think it’s related to Twitter more than Instapaper).

I could contact Marco and ask for a simple tweak in the settings! but you know what? why I will bother him? keep the guy doing his amazing work!

So yeah, developers 1 – tyranny 0 :D