It’s on thing to find beauty, but it’s a whole new level of awesome when it comes with brains.
First one, is Tweet Nest. If you’re ever got the feeling that you don’t own your tweets, this is the tool you’ve been looking for. Tweet Nest is a PHP application, that installs on your web server, and pulls your tweets to your database. You can search through your tweets, style the user interface, and even hack the web app if that’s your kind of thing — it’s open source. Installation isn’t all that complicated, and if you’ve ever installed WordPress on your server, this should be a piece of cake. You do have to manually pull down your tweets by visiting a special url, but nothing that an automator action can’t solve.
Props to Andy Graulund (@graulund) for creating this app, and more importantly, making sure it looks good right out of the box, yet leaving great scope for customisability. If you’ve got a web server, and are looking to archive your tweets, it doesn’t get better than this. I’ve already set mine up, though you should probably check out the official tweet nest since I’ll probably be busy customising mine.
Next up, “Like it? Tweet it!“. Sounds like an ordinary tweet this button, right? I hardly ever click the Retweet button on websites. It’s very intrusive, boots you out of the current page, and leaves you with no context of where you are. There have been handy client side tools like Safari140, but with Twitter Anywhere, Graulund has created a stupendously simple Tweet This form, which once authenticated, allows the user to send tweets from any page with this form installed. It’s dead simple to implement, since you don’t host any of the code, yet you can customise it to your liking via CSS. I’ll be looking into how best to integrate this with our two sites.
Lastly, I must acknowledge the work Graulund puts into his pixels. Each of his visual blog’s entries gets unique styling, making them stand out on their own — much like what Jason Santa Maria started a while ago. Andy Graulund is a 19 year old guy from Denmark, and I bet you he’s one designer/programmer you should keep an eye on.