TwitPrint

Regular visitors will have noticed our blog has been a little bit quiet for the last few days. Well, we can’t spend all our time on our free Twitter printer, we have other things to do! But! We have finally completed the OAuth integration.

In response to popular demand, we have done away with Basic Authentication (the pop up box that asked for your Twitter username and password) and replaced it with the latest Twitter approved authentication – called OAuth.

The benefit of OAuth is that as a user you do not have to provide us with your details to log in. Of course we take data security very seriously, as do the good folks at Twitter.com but now with the help of OAuth, you can log in directly via Twitter. It’s a safer and smarter solution.

We’re here and we’re listening. If you have any thoughts about TwitPrint.com please do let us know!

Until next time,

Happy TwitPrinting!

Following our earlier post about the apparent popularity of Firefox for printing Twitter, we’ve noticed that 3.9% of users in the last 7 days have been using mobile browsers.

A mobile browser is of course a browser on a mobile telephone or other portable device. That’s an interesting idea, but we’re not entirely sure how they intended to print those tweets. Unless they have a mobile printer of course.

If you’ve been using TwitPrint from a mobile browser, please let us know what you’re doing and how TwitPrint is helping you.

Happy TwitPrinting!

A really interesting statistic came up and we wanted to share it with you.

As traffic is sky-rocketing at TwitPrint we’ve noticed that over 68% of visitors are using the Firefox web browser. That’s a lot, and certainly more than the W3Schools.com browser statistics would have you believe.

“Why could this be?” We wondered.

Could it be that Firefox users are more sophisticated? They’ve made the choice to move from IE or another browser so they’re not afraid to try new things, that includes Twitter and TwitPrint.

It’s certainly a surprise, when we only had a few hundred visitors  per day we thought that maybe it was a statistical anomaly, but as visitor numbers have increased we have seen that trend continue.

In response to popular demand, TwitPrint now lets you print up to 3200 tweets! That’s an extra 3,000 tweets more than when we launched!

Of course it assumes you actually have that many historic tweets to print.

We’re working on lots of exciting new features to improve your Twitter printing experience, but we’d love to hear your feedback on how we’re doing. If you like TwitPrint or if there’s a feature that you think is missing, then please let us know.

Until next time, happy TwitPrinting!

Printing Twitter is exciting and fun, especially to see your Twitter stream with Twitpic images included. But there are lots of other exciting ideas we have in the pipeline and we’d like to share just a few of them with you here.

We need to decide which of these to work on first so please do give us feedback if you have a strong opinion about any of these that you’d like to see first.

• Including images from services other than TwitPic
• Different output templates, allowing you to pick a different layout / colours for printing your Twitter
• More filters – we could filter on almost anything, but maybe selecting more than one but less than all users? Filtering just posts with images or just posts without? Just showing images and nothing else?
• Expanding references from within Twitter posts so they are more meaningful on the page.
• Saving your favourite settings

That’s just a few of the ideas on our brainstorming whiteboard.. Please share yours if you have any!

Happy TwitPrinting!

It’s great fun to print your tweets, but maybe not everyone is happy about using up paper.

The answer is simple, you can print to PDF, we mentioned this in an earlier post but didn’t give any details about how to actually send your output to a PDF file rather than the printer. If you already know how to do this, then this post probably won’t be of interest to you.

It’s as easy as installing a printer driver

We would recommend CutePDF, which you can find with Google.

You’ll need to follow the installation instructions on that site, but they’re pretty clear so we won’t repeat them here.

Once your PDF printer driver is installed you’ll be able to see it in your list of available printers when you press print. You just select it as your printer and press print. A few moments later it will ask you where to save your PDF file.

If you don’t normally see a print dialog box appear when you hit print, navigate to File > Print in your web browser menu and print from there.

If you have any problems getting this working, please post a comment here and we’ll try to help.

TwitPrint let’s you select tweets to present in a printer friendly format based any of the following:

• Print all tweets of my and my friends
• Print just the tweets of a selected user that I follow
• Tweets which contain the keyword “X”
• Get the X most recent or oldest tweets
• Include Twitpic.com images
• Include user images (a.k.a. avatars)

You then click on “Get Tweets” to filter and fetch the tweets. Clicking on “Show Tweets” displays the data formatted ready for printing.

Remember, you can always print to a PDF file or Microsoft OneNote if you want to save paper. Also, if you hit “cancel” when the print dialog appears you can use the browser’s “Print Preview” option to get an idea of the output.

So, what might you actually do with TwitPrint?

Well, that’s really up to you. But some ideas might be:

• Print the tweets of your favourite celebrity along with their Twitpics so you can read them all at once in an easy to view list.
• Print all the tweets based on a hash tag (e.g. #followfriday or other trending topic) for posterity (you can currently only fetch tweets of those you follow, and your own of course).
• Print a record of your own tweets with your Twitpic images inserted as a permanent record or journal.
• Print dated tweets as a legal record of what was said and when.

We think that combining Twitter and printing is an interesting juxtapositioning of new media and traditional media and we hope that you find it interesting too.

There are many features we are considering adding to TwitPrint but that’s for another post. What are you printing with TwitPrint and why?

Please remember that TwitPrint.com is currently in beta mode. This means that the site is considered functional but you might still find a bug; if you do, please let us know, remember to tell us how to reproduce the issue so we can check it out and get to work on fixing it.

You can use the Feedback link on the left of the home page, you can comment, or you can send us a message on Twitter @twit_print.

Thanks to @davelee who spotted a rather obvious bug within hours of the site launch.

For those who are curious, it was a glitch in our keyword search function that meant the user avatars were appearing in a random order. Of course we’ve been staring at TwitPrint output for days during testing and we didn’t actually notice this!

It’s fixed now! Thanks Dave!