Blog . Eli Duke . Com

i really enjoy twitter. it has been especially helpful during my time here in Antarctica because of how quick and simple it is to use. sometimes i don’t have the time or energy to post to this blog and sometimes the bandwidth here at McMurdo won’t allow it. twitter is the perfect replacement. it’s quick, it’s simple, and it’s to the point. if you haven’t been following me on twitter, you should start now.

anyhoo, when i was back in the states i used twitter almost exclusively with my cellphone, sending updates via text message. since i’ve been down here in Antarctica i’ve been interacting with twitter through a web browser a lot more. as a result i’ve become much more familiar with how their web interface works, but also how it doesn’t work. one area in particular that i was getting frustrated with was the @replies.

[for those of you that don't know, here is an example: if i wanted to reply to a tweet (an individual post on twitter) that my brother posted i would begin my tweet with @n8duke.]

the annoying part about @replies is that you have to type in “@username” each time you want to reply. sometimes the username is long and annoying, sometimes you might misspell it, and then the reply won’t go where it’s supposed to.

i had an idea, so i sent twitter an email:

From: eli
Date: Sun, Jan 27, 2008 at 12:11 AM
Subject: i hope this is alright…
To: Twitter

Twitter,

i emailed you a while ago about an api question. remember me?

well, i have a suggestion to make about twitter, and i didn’t know who else to turn to and i figured that you’d be as good a person as anyone. i imagine that y’all get all kinds of “really good suggestions”, but i truely believe that this is a good one.

so, here goes…

i enjoy @replies just as much as the next guy, but i hate (i know that’s a strong word) having to type the “@username” into the field every time i want to reply. that would be like having to type in someone’s email address every time i wanted to reply to an email. ridiculous, right? we just click “reply”.

why not implement a feature that would allow you to click a tweet-specific indicator (a “reply” link, maybe?) which would automagically insert “@username” in the text box above? you could easily slip that in right after the {star} icon…

or, is this idea like so last week and you already have it in the works?

eli

i got a response back from twitter a few days later saying that they had not heard that idea before and that it would be submitted to the team. then, lo and behold, a few days later i noticed this:

do you see that little arrow after the star icon? that’s me, baby! that’s all me!

every so often, when i’m “surfing the web”, i peruse my blog stats. wordpress does a pretty damn good job of showing how people are getting to your blog and where they’re going when they leave. they also have a good plot-line graph that shows your traffic per day, week, or month. i’m always curious how things are going in that regard.

anyhoo, about a week ago i noticed a HUGE spike!

i poked around in the referrer section and found that i was getting about 99% of that traffic from stumbleupon.com. i looked into it and found out that a friend of mine from nintendo posted a link to my site on that site. apparently the traffic immediately started flooding in and continued to do so for about 24 hours. i continue to get about 1 or 2 hits a day from there, but nothing significant since. it’s weird how stuff like that happens.

on another nerdy/computer related note, meredith was transferring some video files from my external hard drive to her laptop the other day and was bothered by Apple’s time estimations, like, “about 1 minute.” she said that computers aren’t people and they shouldn’t act like they are. i completely disagree. i love it when computers “say” things like that. a few days later i found another good example of that sort of thing from flickr. i was testing out the new “edit” feature and received the following message after i canceled the edit.

nicely done, flickr. nicely done.

in antarctica news, things are still going really well, but it’s pretty obvious that we (the galley crew) are all getting tired. it’s been well over 4 months for win-fly and just about 3 months for mainbody, and that’s a long time to scrub the same dishes and mop the same floors. we’ve got about a week until xmas (which will be just as crazy as thanksgiving), followed by the cargo ship off-load in the middle of january. soon thereafter people start leaving, and we will probably be on some of the later flights out around the middle of february. i have no doubts that we’ll make it out alive, but we’ll never be the same. ha ha!

also, i just uploaded a new batch of photos.