The next release of the 140dev Twitter framework will introduce a set of tweet display themes. There will just be 4 at first, but I intend to have about a dozen by the following version. I know people love pre-built themes.

Refined

Business

Colorful

Minimalist

The first day has gone well. I announced the code on the Twitter dev list, and got 16 visitors to the site. The good thing is that the average pages per visitor was 7, and they spent an average of 11 minutes on the site. So people who get to the code are giving it a good amount of attention.

I’m also using this code as an starting point to teach my son Web programming. He has taken a course in Java in school, and has experience setting up WordPress blogs, but hasn’t done any PHP or server based coding. Working through the install process for 140dev with him was very informative. I’m going to rewrite the install page for the Twitter Database Server based on his feedback.

The biggest problem is identifying the target audience. Is it people who have never used Telnet or worked at a Unix-style prompt? Is it someone who has coded in PHP for a while, but has never used the Twitter API? One solution is to produce tutorials and programming primers to help bridge this gap.

I also want to make the install process much simpler. That is the obvious blocking point. If I can make the install on the database server module easy, the rest of the framework will be a breeze.

Overall, I’m happy with the first day’s results.

I’ve been cleaning up the code the last few days. I finally got around to switching to tweet entities. They’ve been around for a while, but every time people complained about a problem Twitter HQ said that developers should code for their occasional disappearance. I don’t have time to code for a major data component being there part of the time. The complaints have died down, so I guess it is stable now. I don’t disagree with the Twitter model of getting improvements out early, but I stay away from the bleeding edge.

One of the nice things about entities is that they include the disambiguated versions of shortened URLs. That saves a ton of processing time for each user of the API, and even more bandwidth for the target of popular URLs. Unfortunately, they only contain the original value of URLs that are shortened by Twitter itself through its t.co domain.

I’m also making sure that every piece of text is pulled out into config files. I want this code to work for any language.

My son is coming back from school for the weekend, and I want to review it with him. He’s my target user. He knows a little PHP and Javascript. If I can make this system easily installable for him, then it will be ready to make public.