A warm welcome to all visitors from over at Copyblogger (and a big thank you to Brian for dropping me a link.) What follows is my brief explanation of the work I did to combine all the contest entries in one place. 

But if you don't care about the process and only the end result (how Machiavellian of you), you can always skip my therapeutic blather and get right to the goods at the end of this post. 

Oh and if you like what you read, Click Here to subscribe to my blog and receive post updates by email or RSS. 

One more thing: If you enjoyed this contest, then bookmark this blog and come on back on Wednesday to check out a brand new Twitter competition launching on Smithereens, inspired by this one... See you then!) 

The contest, Can You Put the Wit in Twitter?, is now live - head over and give it your best shot when you're through reading here.

As you know from my previous post, I really enjoyed Copyblogger's recent and wildly successful Twitter Writing Contest. The competition closed on Friday and the winners, who will be announced on Wednesday, May 28th, will take home these incredible prizes. 

The contest page attracted more than 600 comments, 450 of which contained links to Twitter statuses (like this one that is good [but can't win] by Copyblogger contributor and communications blogger Sonia Simone, for example) containing a piece of literature in exactly 140 characters, a new genre I have (unilaterally) dubbed TwitLit. 

As someone who really enjoys both reading and writing, I quickly submitted my own entry, and then tried my best to follow the flood of comments as they came in, clicking back and forth, back and forth between Copyblogger and Twitter...

But as much as I was enjoying the bite-sized fiction people were submitting, I couldn't bear to continue the back-and-forth madness any longer, so I set out to find a solution to the problem instead, which I could in turn share with anyone else who wanted to read all the entries AND (bonus!) not have an aneurysm.

In my previous post, I presented a solution using bookmarks and Diigo that I thought would work, but in the end it was a bit too buggy for my liking, and perfectionist that I am, I just didn't find it elegant enough. That's why today, I put on my thinking cap and came up with something even better (I think, anyway.)

So, without further ado, here is the Simple Ten Step Process I took to combine all the valid entries to the contest in one accessible place. 

Ten Simple Steps to Going Insane

1. Overwhelmed by the increasing numbers of contest entries and frustrated by the lack of any common place to view them all, I decided to figure out a way to aggregate them myself. First, I checked to see if Twitter had a Groups feature. Should be easy, I thought, just add all the entries to one Group and then they'll all be easily accessible in one place. Right? Wrong. 'No Groups for you,' says Twitter, 'we're just trying to stay online.'


2. Next, I tried to scrape the Copyblogger post and create an RSS feed out of all the links in the comments, but FeedYes wouldn't parse any links in the comments. So, since Copyblogger offers the ability to follow comments on their posts via email, I figured I'd try a service claiming to be able to convert email chains into RSS feeds. That didn't work either.
   
   


3. I had an epiphany! What if I opened all the entries one by one in tabs, bookmarked them all, and then uploaded them to a social bookmarking service like Diigo? Without hesitation, I sprung into tedium: I opened up Firefox with the Tab Mix Plus Extension, set it to open all links in new tabs, manually clicked through every link in the Copyblogger post until they were all open, bookmarked all tabs in one foul swoop and imported the folder into Diigo, then gouged my eyes out.


4. I got extremely excited to see that Diigo's WebSlides service would actually show all 455 entries in a slideshow! Exactly what I wanted - a user-friendly, simple way to read all these great pieces of Twitterature!


5. But alas, it was too good to be true: the slideshow would only show 20 slides at first, and now shows 150, which is a good start, but still excludes the majority of the 455 entries. My efforts were not all in vain here, of course, because the entries could still all be viewed here in a List View with Quick Preview, but it wasn't the perfect solution by any means. [UPDATE: All 481 slides seem to be working now, so you can view them there if you prefer, but the slideshows embedded below are a bit more filtered, down to 332. Thanks to Diigo for fixing the issues.]


6. Next, I took my crazy pills and decided that images would be easier to work with than URLs, so I opened all 455 bookmarks in Firefox again and set out to read every last one of them (I wanted to anyway, for...fun?) But as I read, I also took a screenshot of each valid entry (excluding ones that didn't follow the rules, see below) until my desktop was littered with 331 photos. (Check out this desktop screenshot action.) Apple-Shift-4-Drag, Apple-Shift-4-Drag, Apple-Shift-4-Drag... almost as satisfying as the sound of an old-timey typewriter!


7. I then tried to upload the photos to flickr so I could share them here on my blog in their slick flash slideshow app. But uh oh - I must upgrade to Pro in order to display that many photos in a set! Do not pass Go, do not collect 200 photos. 


8. So then I tried to upload images 201-331 to Photobucket, thinking two slideshow widgets would still be better than 331 disparate links in a comment queue, right? Well, the upload goes smoothly, only to find out that PB only allows 30 images in its slideshows! Sigh.     


9. Getting desperate, I tried Pix-Yu.com, which had no limits, but plenty of suck (the widget just wouldn't work and the site was slowwwww-loading for me.) Then I tried to upload photos from flickr and Photobucket into one widget on Slide.com... only to find they also limit their Slideshows, to 50 photos. How can this possibly be so difficult?


10. Finally, I decide to just (gasp) open a second flickr account. I'm sure this is probably against the TOS, but I couldn't figure out any other workaround and I wasn't about to pay and Upgrade to Pro just for this little project. So I was able to configure the native flickr slideshow in an iframe for photos 1-200, and use the very cool Pictobrowser tool to create the second slideshow for screenshots 201-331 (because you can't have two different iframe widgets for two different accounts on the same page...)    

And there you have it! The long and arduous journey that brought us to this point, the point where I can happily say: Sit back, relax, and watch all 331 valid entries in succession on the two slideshow widgets embedded below. 

FYI, in aggregating these, I have filtered out entries that didn't meet Brian's rules for the contest because they: weren't exactly 140 characters, used excessive symbols or txt-spk instead of words, or included things like titles, "The End" and "@copyblogger."  Others were left out because they didn't use proper punctuation (no space after period or comma,excessive.....use....of...ellipses...or other punctuation!!!!!!), because their entry made no sense to me upon repeated readings or because they posted an incorrect link/had their updates set to private. That weeded the reading down from 455+ to the 331 you'll see below.

Bon appetweet!    

[PS: If you are reading this in an RSS reader, you will probably have to click through to view the widgets.]

[PPS: I accidentally left out this entry by Bob Finch (refinch on Twitter), not because he broke any rules, but probably because I spent multiple hours clicking through tabs and just plain missed it! His blog is here, so check it out, and his entry is now included in the second slideshow below, so despite references to 331 throughout the shows now actually contain 332 entries. If you can't find your own entry in the slideshow and don't know why, leave me a comment below and I'll look into it!]

Entries 1-200:











Entries 200-331:



















If you liked this post, please Digg it using the button below, leave me a note in the comments, or even better, link to it on your own blog! Thanks in advance.

[If you are arriving at this post from a link promising to show you all the Copyblogger Twitter Writing contest entries in one place, you might as well click over here to read the most recent post with the up-to-date information, and to see the flashy new slideshows. If you're just trying to read and I'm getting in your way, I apologize, proceed.]

Earlier this week, one of my favourite sites, Copyblogger announced a really cool contest - a writing competition held completely on Twitter, the micro-blogging platform that has the web abuzz. From the post:

Can you tell a story in exactly 140 characters? That’s the idea behind the first ever @copyblogger Twitter writing contest. It should be a great exercise and a lot of fun. Being constrained to exactly 140 characters will spark your creative juices and force you to focus stringently on word choice, sentence structure, and even punctuation.

You see, Twitter limits all "tweets" (or mini-posts) to 140 characters or less (the same as the length of a standard text message, if you were wondering), so holding the contest on that service really forces all entrants to put their minds to work and filter their thoughts into one very brief nugget.

I had stayed away from Twitter until this week, but the contest so piqued my interest that I caved in,  set up an account of my own (you can also see my most recent activity in a new widget at the bottom of my sidebar) and submitted my own entry:

We all expected nuclear war, epidemics, melted ice caps. But poisoning by plastic? A childless world? We had no contingency plan for that.

Ooh, I know, the suspense! (Actually that's a bit of a nut graph of that novel I'm working on, slowly and steadily. And by nut graph I mean that's all I've written so far [Kidding.])

There are many great stories in the queue so far, but one of my favourites is this clever (and funny) quip by Andy Roberts, which is also pictured on the top of this post. [His Twitter profile here, his excellent blog here.]:

I feel my neighbours make far too much fuss about their precious lawns and flower borders. So stealthily from my side, I grow weeds at them.

In addition to the glory, the winner will receive an 4GB Ipod Nano [Update: the prize has been significantly upgraded, plus 2nd and 3rd prizes added] , so if you fancy yourself a writer and want to give it a try, head over to Twitter and register, then write your story and post a link to it in the comments on the Copyblogger article. 

OK But What's All That About Twitter Needing Groups?

Overall, I have found Twitter to be a fun and interesting way of interacting online, as well as a great way of passing along and picking up interesting links. But one shortcoming I did notice (aside from the fact that its servers keep going down too often) was the lack of any sort of Group functionality.

If you've been over to the Copyblogger site, you'll know that there are over 455 entries to the contest so far. And to read them all (or even a few of them) requires a grueling session of clicking back and forth between the post and the individual Twitter links. 

If only there was some way to add your Tweets to a Copyblogger Twitter Contest Group, for example. Then you could just hop onto the group and view all the entries easily in one place. 

Even a tagging option would work here - have everyone tag (or label) their post "Copytwitter" or something, and then a simple search for that tag would accomplish the same thing.

But alas, at least as far as my rookie eyes can tell, there is no way to do either of these things. So, after hearing that fellow Twitterer Andy Roberts was growing frustrated about the same issue, I decided to try and do something about it.

My (Pretty-Darn-Good-If-I-Do-Say-So-Myself) Makeshift Solution 

Last night, I pondered how these scattered links might somehow be aggregated and made convenient. First, I tried scraping the post to create a custom RSS feed, but FeedYes (which has worked very well for me in the past) wouldn't recognize any links in the comments. Then I tried using a few different email-to-RSS converters to convert that email thread I'm getting from Copyblogger advising of me each new entry into a public feed... but again, no dice.

So finally, I decided to go old school. Well, as old school as aggregating Twitter links by hand and posting them to a social bookmarking service can be considered (which I suppose, isn't very, but I digress.)

So I loaded up Firefox and using the Tab Mix Plus Extension, set new links to open in a new tab without switching focus. And then, yes, I manually went through and clicked every single link in that post until I had hundreds of tabs open in FF (I should have taken a screenshot, in hindsight, but alas, I did not.)  

Once all the links were open in tabs, I used Firefox's built-in "Bookmark All Tabs" function to create a folder containing them all.

Then, using social bookmarking site Diigo (which was recommended to me by Linden over at Linden's Pensieve),  I imported the bookmarks folder, put them all in a list called CopyTwitter and thought I was done.

But finally,  I was delighted to see that Diigo would do me one better than a list of links: a feature called WebSlides gave me a link that will let you all view every single entry (to date) in the Copyblogger contest in a really cool slideshow! [See Update Below]

So without further ado, here is my gift to you: CopyTwitter. Head over and have a good little read (or 455 of them and counting, if you like.)

[UPDATE: So it seems Twitter is dying again. In case it wasn't obvious, the slide show will only work when Twitter is fully operational. As of right now some of the slides appear and others do not because of Twitter issues. Hopefully they get their stuff together sooner rather than later. 

Twitter is back up now (albeit sluggish), but the Diigo slideshow is only showing slides 1-150 of 455 [Note: I have added the Thursday and Friday entries now as well]; the Diigo team has assured me they are working to fix it. In the meantime, if you prefer a simple list to slides, you can see that here, and it allows you to preview each one so it's still faster than reading many comments on Copyblogger. 

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Or if you really want to view all the links in a slick slideshow that works, click over to my updated post with embedded widgets here.]

I will continue to add new links manually to the slideshow until the contest ends on Friday. If I've missed any, please let me know in the comments and I will make sure to add them as well. 

As always, if you have any responses, questions or suggestions, I'd love to hear them in the comments. 

And if you liked this post, consider subscribing to my RSS feed using the big Orange button at the top of my blog - hope to see you back again!

If you're in the market for a bad pun tee shirt with attitude (who isn't?), you can buy this one on Threadless. 





You didn't think I forgot about your favourite weekly theme post, did you? Well of course I didn't - how could I let such a pundamental segment slip my mind?



WORDPLAY WEDNESDAY NUMBER 2



This week, it is a reader contribution three-fer, plus a bonus fourth gem I came across in my web travels.



The first reader-suggested pun , you've already read! That genius bit in the title there, I wish I could take credit for, but I can't. It is loosely adapted from this very clever and apropos comment Jacqueline left on last week's post:

It's unfortunate you are only gracing your blog with puns on Wednesdays. As the saying goes "seven days without puns makes one weak." [See the original comment page here.]

Kudos and thanks for sharing!



Another reader, Sarah Jo Austin (her blog here) suggested a couple other nuggets, one an original real-life quip and the other a well-crafted pun, some variation of which I have seen on the web before, but that is still good. Both are worth a mention here. To paraphrase her contributions:

1) At a Bible study, my friend Paul was complaining that he hated shaving and wished there was a way to shave once and never shave again, to which I promptly replied, "You mean, like, once shaved, always shaved?"

[Editor's note, if you didn't get that one, see my comment on the comments page for an explanation.]

2) A group of monks in Los Angeles started selling flowers in upper-class neighborhoods to raise money for the poor. They knocked on the door of Hugh Hefner, who did not appreciate the canvassing in his neighborhood, regardless of their agenda. So he called his lawyer, who went to city hall and the council soon passed a law against selling flowers door to door. The moral of the story: only Hugh can prevent florist friars. 

And, as promised, a bonus fourth one for you. Gadget blog Gizmodo ran a story last Friday about so-called grass photography. From the post:

By placing a "canvas" of grass in a darkroom and shining light on it that first passes through a film negative, artist/scientists have been able to tweak the chlorophyll levels of blades of grass and create living photographs. [Ed note: you can see examples of the phenomenon over on the Giz post.]

And witty commenter Bosskev (whose group blog about Mac film-making is here) chimed in with our bonus pun of the week:

So, adapting photosynthesis for, um, photo synthesis? [Skip right to the comment with this link.]

And th-th-th-that's all for this week folks - thank you to the readers who submitted their best material, and thanks to Bosskev for giving me permission to quote his quip here, too.









Now just like last week, if you have a great piece of word play that you're just dying to share, let's hear it in the comments and you may get included in next week's segment. (The honour, I know!)