Create a multi-column Twitter client with 12 lines of HTML
Posted by Ben Hughes in Programming, tags: twitter
A while ago I switched from Tweetdeck to TwitHive for all my desktop Twitter usage. It has a lot of advantages, like being completely web-based so you can take your lists/groups with you, and you don’t have to install anything to use it. However, recently I’ve noticed more and more that TwitHive isn’t picking up all @replies, which is sort of a deal breaker. This is apparently due to a bug in the Twitter search API, but knowing that doesn’t really help me.
I’ve been using Dabr as my mobile Twitter client for a long time, and it’s awesome. Rock solid, (mildly) customisable and constantly being improved. I often wish that Dabr would put together a multi-column web-based client aimed at desktop users. In the mean time, I’ve decided to hack (and really, I mean hack) something together. So, here it is in all its glory:
<html>
<head>
<title>Twitter</title>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="300">
</head>
<body>
<iframe src="http://dabr.co.uk/" width="300" height="100%"></iframe>
<iframe src="http://dabr.co.uk/replies" width="300" height="100%"></iframe>
<iframe src="http://dabr.co.uk/lists/benrhughes/rl" width="300" height="100%"></iframe>
<iframe src="http://dabr.co.uk/lists/benrhughes/dev-tech" width="300" height="100%"></iframe>
</body>
</html>
The design and implementation took literally as long as typing the text… not a lot of thought or polish here folks! The main trick is to log into Dabr in one column then refresh the page. Obviously you’ll need to change the hard-coded ‘column’ contents to be whatever you want. And you could probably do a lot to make it look nicer, if you could be bothered.
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