I should really have been filling out job applications this morning, but got carried away with fixing this issue having acccidentally come across a site that was clearly doing almst exactly what I wanted. A bit of searching after that led me to Oliver Brechét’s page, which contained the CSS, JQuery and brief explanation of how to apply the “widget”.

Although there is a WordPress version, these widget’s tend to knacker any preferred settings that I’ve already written in to the underlying PHP, so I added this by linking in the PHP itself, rather than using the WP widget.

I don’t quite follow 100% of the JQuery script (another item on my to do list!) but could garner enough of what was going on in it to rewrite it to fit my own, rather more sparse, needs. This also meant that a lot of the included CSS was unnecessary so could just be copied in to my main CSS sheet and adjusted for appearance (no header, no separator lines, no borders and no background). I imagine this is against Twitter’s new usage requirements and that I will thus soon be excommunicated…

Main change was to the fetchTweetsData function, edited down as follows, preceding lines to the first, italicised one unchanged:

obj.finalText = $([linkURLs(obj.writeTweet, obj.entities)]).linkUser().linkHash()[0];
obj.header = '';
obj.avatar = '<div class="tweet"><div class="avatar"><a '+rel()+' '+target()+' href="'+obj.userUrl+'"></a></div>';
obj.textTweet = '<div class="mt_text">'+obj.finalText;
obj.footer = '<div class="time">'+obj.tweetTime+'</div></div><div style="clear:both;"></div></div>';
return obj;

Consequently, the only CSS used was:

.tweets {
 max-width:245px;
 max-height:150px;
 font:13px/17px "Tahoma",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;
 color:#CCC;
 background-color:transparent;
 margin:auto;
}

.tweets a {
 color:#d08702;
 text-decoration:none;
}

.tweets a:hover {
 color: #f7d274;
}

.tweets .tweet {
 padding-bottom: 15px;
 text-align: left;
}

.tweets .tweet .time {
 float:right;
 color:#999;
 font-size:11px;
 padding-left: 10px;
}

.tweets .tweet .avatar {
 display:block;
 float:left;
 background-image: url(images/tweet.png);
 height: 15px;
 width: 21px;
 background-repeat: no-repeat;
 background-position: top;
}
.tweets .tweet .avatar a {
 display:block;
 height: 15px;
 width: 21px;
}

.mt_text {
 padding-left:25px;
}

Excellent work, Mr Brechét, and thanks!

[Original code that inspired this and has slightly different, or broader, functionality, is here]

I’ve heard it compared to watching a streaming movie, rather than buying a DVD.

And that’s the sticking point, right there. It’s not the same thing. Reading a comic is a shorter and more individual experience; one that I prefer full control of and choice of where I do it.  Long-time comic collectors are just not going to get their heads around this. There is no download: you have to be online in order to read comics you “own”.

Last Saturday, the Comixology website was down for “temporary maintenance” for at least 2 hours – quite probably a lot more but I stopped checking. All that time, you can’t read the comics you’ve paid for. And if they mangle their database or go out of business, bang go your comics. You’re renting them, not buying them.

The problem, I fear, is that they have focussed on stopping piracy instead of producing a good service. I don’t think that’s the way to do this – the scanners will still scan the printed versions and torrent them as CBR files for the scavengers. All they’re really doing is acting on paranoia and, simultaneously, losing me as a customer.

I don’t mind being locked in to your application to read the comics but I want to be able to download them, back them up and read them offline whenever I wish, networked or not. It is possible – Graphic.ly* do it, allowing download of an encrypted version that can be read offline (although, it has to be said, it does appear that you need to be online for a minute or so to log the software in).

Android and iPhone apps download a version, but I’m not reading comics on an iPod (too small!) and an iPad is an unnecessary luxury, so not that either. So I guess I’m out of the new digital frontier. No streaming comics for me, thanks.

Print is better, of course, but I’m running out of space so this is a disappointing dead end…

*Home of the excellent Billy the Monster Hunter, for one thing!

As a kid, I was pretty enthralled with the idea of space flight. Still am, I guess. And now an era has ended.

No flights. Earth orbit flights. Landing on the moon. That’s NASA in reverse. Summed up:

The argument usually seems to be  that it simply costs too much – even though NASA produces $10 for every $1 invested. So I guess it’s the short-sightedness of seeing easily how much it will cost without seeing the guaranteed return. But exploration and research doesn’t really work like that. Sadly, to me, it’s the triumph of capitalism over the spirit of adventure; the need for ROI instead of JOY.

So the last shuttle flight is the end, for now, of the USA in space. With a budget deficit the size of a planet, when will they dare venture again? And if they don’t, who will fill the gap? Europe? India? My cynical view is that space flight will only occur if it’s about laying satellites, new alloys, that sort of thing – you know: making a profit. With capitalism now global, compared to when men landed on the moon, or even when that first shuttle headed off, it’s difficult to see the desire for profit margins ever changing (TV news is full of economics these days; I’m sure that never used to be the case!).

So whence the trip to Mars? Pub conversation yesterday suggested that one of BRIC nations, perhaps, once fully established in the New World Order of wealth and economic power, might have so much cash sloshing about that they then think: “you know what, fuck it – let’s build a massive space ship and get OUT THERE!”.

Me? I’m less optimistic than Mark.

R.I.P. space shuttle.