I looked at the @puzzazz stream. It's interesting, but you've already
got a mix of links to puzzles and embedded puzzles and clues. So I'm
not sure what you'd lose by making your tweet stream 100 percent links
with searchable US-ASCII text, other than getting filtered out by
algorithms that say, "Don't follow people whose tweets are 90 percent
links or more." ;-) This looks like a fun tweet stream, and I followed
it. ;-)
And by having every tweet contain a link, you *gain* click tracking,
using, say, the free bit.ly pro tracking capability! I assume you're
trying to "market" something, for some definition of "market". Why not
make it easy for Google and Bing to find you via Twitter, and for
yourself to monitor, by having your tweets be a mix of natural human
language and trackable links?
--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
borasky-research.net/m-edward-ed-borasky/
"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." ~ Paul Erdos
Quoting Roy Leban <r...@royleban.com>:
To Scott and Brian, please take a look at the tweets on @Puzzazz. There is
no other way to have them appear correctly. What I am doing is not annoying
in the least and it may be futile in your particular Twitter clients but I
tested what I'm doing in many clients and it worked fine.
I'm open to suggestions but "you're screwed" is not a suggestion. And
changing what I'm doing doesn't address the fact that Twitter has a bug.
For the record \u00a0 did not work. I didn't try   as I got to
first. I would guess it would work but have the same bug with Twitter.
/Roy
On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 8:13 AM, Scott Wilcox <sc...@tig.gr> wrote:
Agreed, I strip out too.
On 8 Mar 2010, at 15:57, Brian Smith wrote:
>> Hi Taylor,
>>
>> I tried %20 along with a lot of other things and was the only
thing that worked in all places -- the web, Twitter clients, and SMS
messages to cell phones. Other than this problem, it has worked great for
nine months. If Twitter has made changes such that %20 will now work where
it didn't before, I'd be happy to switch. But, my guess is that this bug
would apply equally well to the %20s.
> First of all, %20 is a regular space, URL-encoded. The non-breaking space
is Unicode codepoint 160 (A0h). You can encode the non-breaking space in XML
as " " and in JSON as "\u00a0".
>
> Secondly, I don't know what you are doing with the non-breaking spaces,
but they're unlikely to work as you expect them to. My Twitter client
replaces all runs of consecutive whitespace (including newlines,
tabs,non-breaking spaces, and more exotic whitespace) as a single normal
space, and I suspect that many apps will do the same. Attempts to control
the layout of a tweet are futile at worst and annoying at best. I am sure
you are trying to format tweets in a helpful, non-annoying, cool way, but
your formatting is unlikely to survive given the anti-annoying-people
countermeasures that good clients have in place.
>
> Cheers,
> Brian :)
