Replacing broken avatar images with background SVG Emoji


Group of emoji.

When someone on Twitter mentions my blog, the WordPress WebMentions plugin automatically fetches those Tweets and turns them into comments on the blog post. It looks something like this: That is pretty cool - but has one slight problem. If someone changes their Twitter avatar, or deletes their account, the image disappears and I'm left with a broken image. Booo! So, how do we fix this? With the awesome power of SVG and Emoji! As pointed out by Lea Verou, SVGs can contain Emoji. Which…

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Review: Boyue Likebook P78 eReader - the Anti-Kindle


An eInk tablet.

Before I start this blog post - here's a big fat warning. You will get no support from Boyue if things go wrong with your device. I have their previous model, the Likebook Ares. After less than a year of use, I noticed screen discolouration. The eBay reseller wasn't interested in helping me with a return. Boyue ignored my repeated complaints - and I was stuck with a defective unit. So I waited until Boyue released their new version and cheekily asked if I could review it. They happily sent…

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What's the window size of a background tab?


The Outer window size is zero by zero.

Whenever I open Twitter in a new tab on my phone, the page layout looks weird for a few seconds. It starts out looking like the desktop view and then, after a few seconds, it snaps back to the mobile view. What's causing this? Try opening this link to a window size detector in a background tab. Then visit that tab. On Chrome, this is what I see. If I hit the refresh button on that tab, the Outer window size snaps back: What's going on? According to the specification: The…

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Outdated Advice For Job Applicants


A golden envelope.

I was recently asked to look at some advice for new graduates entering the workforce. It was the usual mix of helpful, obvious, and trite. You know the sort - tailor your application to the job specification, make sure your CV is spelled correctly, don't give up, etc. In the middle of it, was this doozy. "Put your application in a gold coloured envelope so it stands out from the crowd!" This struck me as… unusual advice. But I checked against the Twitter hive mind. Terence Eden is on M…

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(re) Introducing TweeView - a Tree Visualisation for Twitter Conversations


A dozen or so Tweets in a thread.

Previously on Terence Eden's blog... About 4 years ago, I wrote about Visualising Twitter Conversations in 2D Space. Based on an idea by Lucy Pepper, I built a quick hack to show what Twitter threads actually looked like. Well, lockdown finally got the best of me, and I finished the project! TweeView.ml Here are a few screenshots of "interesting" trees, and a little bit about how it works. In this example, the user has a main thread that they are posting on: You can see that a few people…

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Visualising Twitter Conversations in 3D Space


A small conversation.

Here's set of visualisation I've been working on. Last night, at #TapIntoTwitter, I demonstrated a fun way to view your Twitter conversations as a force-directed graph in 3D space. I'm going to show it off to you, then explain how it works. This is a designed as a "fun" demo. Here we go! So, what's going on? As I've previously blogged about, Twitter has a new conversations API. That allows you to get Tweet replies in a tree-like structure. A small conversation looks something like this: …

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