{"id":314,"date":"2009-05-19T14:14:50","date_gmt":"2009-05-19T19:14:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/19\/improving-twittercom-space-to-work\/"},"modified":"2009-05-19T14:14:53","modified_gmt":"2009-05-19T19:14:53","slug":"improving-twittercom-space-to-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/19\/improving-twittercom-space-to-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Improving Twitter.com: Space to Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Change<\/h3>\n

Enlarge the “What are you doing” box on Twitter.com<\/a>, to make compressing substantial ideas easier.<\/p>\n

\"Twitter.com<\/p>\n

Motivation<\/h3>\n

I’ve been disappointed with the posting interface of every Twitter-client I’ve tried so far. Just like any writing, tweets start with a first draft. My first drafts are often longer than 140 characters. That shouldn’t be a problem; trimming the fat is part of any editing process. But most Twitter-interfaces are so downright hostile<\/em> to anything longer then 140 characters<\/strong> that trimming a 145 letter utterance is a frustrating study in fighting my tools.<\/p>\n

(The worst client I tried was, Blogo<\/a>, which would stop you from typing and yell at you with a dialog<\/em> if you dared press another key after typing 140 characters. But Twitterrific<\/a> was little better; I don’t understand how something so user-un<\/em>friendly became so popular.)<\/p>\n

Even Twitter.com<\/a> doesn’t give you enough room for writing a long, but under-the-limit tweet. To see for yourself, just start typing “mmmmm”; the box will run out of room before you run out of characters. It’s downright crazy to have to scroll to see all of a tweet<\/em> you are writing.<\/p>\n

Now there’s nothing wrong with trying to prescribe a pithy style of communication. Clearly Twitter wouldn’t have worked otherwise. But punishing users for doing the “wrong” thing isn’t as effective as giving them the tools to change their behavior<\/strong>, to wit: space to work on shortening their writing.<\/p>\n

The Code<\/h3>\n

This CSS<\/a> code makes the direct-messaging, and “what are you doing?” text-boxes tall enough to hold 5 lines of text without scrolling. By default Twitter’s web interface only holds 2 lines of text on screen.<\/p>\n

\n#dm_update_box #direct_message_form fieldset div.info textarea#text,\n#status_update_box #status_update_form fieldset div.info textarea#status {\n\theight: 6em !important;\n}\n<\/pre>\n
The selectors I used are pretty specific to Twitter.com<\/a>, so it’s unlikely this will interfere with another site’s layout, unless it’s HTML code is nearly identical to Twitter’s.<\/p>\n
How-To: Safari<\/h3>\n
Copy the above code into a .css file, (“CustomSafari.css” is what I called mine) then select that file in Safari -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Style sheet:<\/strong>
\n\"safariStyleSheet.png\"<\/p>\n
After restarting Safari, Twitter’s web interface should give you room to work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Change Enlarge the “What are you doing” box on Twitter.com, to make compressing substantial ideas easier. Motivation I’ve been disappointed with the posting interface of every Twitter-client I’ve tried so far. Just like any writing, tweets start with a first draft. My first drafts are often longer than 140 characters. That shouldn’t be a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13,10,8],"tags":[421,328,59,91,60,359],"class_list":["post-314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-sample-code","category-tips","category-usability","tag-css","tag-html","tag-safari","tag-twitter","tag-web","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}