How Twitter Developers Can Combat Abuse


The Twitter logo.

Here's a simple step that Twitter App Developers can do to reduce the amount of abuse which is generated on the platform. A few friends of mine regularly receive harassment on Twitter. Typically, there are two ways to deal with it: Mute the offending user. This means their tweets to you never show up in […]

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New Year - New Dabr


Way back in 2008, David Carrington created Dabr - a really simple mobile website for accessing Twitter. Dabr@dabrFact of the month: @dabr is now 5 years old! Born in August 2008 when @davidcarrington was inspired by @Whatleydude.❤️ 7💬 10🔁 013:59 - Mon 16 September 2013 In those days, Twitter had a kick-arse API and were […]

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Dabr Helps Ai Weiwei!


I've written before about Dabr, the Twitter client I code for. Dabr helps people around the world and is used by some of Twitter's most influential users. Today, I am pleased to announce that Chinese artist, political prisoner, and sower of porcelain sunflower seed, Ai Weiwei uses dabr! On last night's Newsnight, as part of […]

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Displaying Twitter Photos via Entities


Twitter has announced that it will soon open up a native photo sharing service. Rather than using an external service like Embed.ly to retrieve thumbnails, all the data is embedded within Twitter Entities. So, if you request a status using "include_entities=true", you will be able to grab the image and display the thumbnail using the […]

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Dabr, Dabr, Everywhere...


I contribute code to Dabr - a mobile twitter client. It's a great project to keep my hand in the world of PHP, APIs, SVN, and all the other tools that are essential to the modern online world. Dabr's strength for developers is two-fold Dead easy to install. Unzip the files, fill in your API […]

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Getting Images from a Foursquare Checkin


Photo of a MacBook. The decal sticker is of Iron Man. His hand blaster is replaced with the Apple logo.

"Oi!" shouted Whatleydude, "Get Dabr to show images from foursquare checkins!" "Righty-ho sir!" I said. I started coding furiously. Of course, things are never quite as simple as I first thought.... So, how do we go from http://4sq.com/fgIWov to 1 Expand the URL Get your Bit.ly API Key. http://api.bitly.com/v3/expand ?shortUrl=http://4sq.com/fgIWov &login=YOUR_BIT_LY_USERNAME &apiKey=YOUR_BIT_LY_API_KEY &format=txt You can, […]

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Twitter API - pagination and IDs


The Twitter logo.

Looking for some Twitter API help.  Bit of a geeky post, this... Pagination is the act of splitting data into logical  pages. Suppose I had a list of item, numbered 0 - 99.  If I want 20 items per page, it's trivial to see that pagination looks like: p1 = 0-19 p2 = 20-40 p3 […]

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HOWTO: Twitpic and OAuth


Logo of TwitPic.

I am no longer confused! Here is a quick tutorial in how to post images to Twitpic and Twitter when using OAuth. I'm indebted to Steve Corona of Twitpic, for his help with this. You can see the full code on Dabr's Google Code page. First of all, you'll need to have enabled OAuth for […]

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Bugs in Twitter Text Libraries


The Twitter Engineering Team have a set of text processing classes which are meant to simplify and standardise the recognition of URLs, screen names, and hashtags. Dabr makes use of them to keep in conformance with Twitter's style. One of the advantages of the text processing is that it will recognise that www.example.com is a […]

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Dabr - Reply to all and Geotagging


People have been very excited to see some new functionality in Dabr - the mobile Twitter client I develop for. But what is it and how does it work? Reply to All The @@ symbol allows you to reply to all the people mentioned within the tweet. It only shows up on tweets which mention […]

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