All 331 Entries to Copyblogger's TwitLit Contest in One (Better) Place [aka How to Go Insane in Ten Simple Steps]

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:



















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