DCortesi . blog

Christmas day, as usual, has been a busy and productive day for me. I seem to be getting in the habit of coding up random stuff when I get a week to myself, and Christmas 2008 was no exception. I was sitting around this evening working on a project, when I got side-tracked…and then side-tracked again. I realized that through a (intentional?) quirk of how Twitter stores it’s relationship data, the first person you ever followed could be determined very easily. A few hours later and I tossed up My First Follow, an application that shows who your first friend on Twitter was. Ah, memories.

You’ll notice I also updated my blog design. Much more copacetic, in my opinion.

I hope everybody had a good Christmas, I sure enjoyed mine.

Despite working myself like a horse recently, I still somehow find the time to hack on TweetStats every once in a while. I’m not really sure what motivates me so much to work on a site that generates zero revenue and has little practical use…but it’s fun and it distracts me from all those other things I should be doing.

Well TweetStats was mentioned in an article about Twitter tools that was on the front page of Digg recently. Fortunately, I moved the background processes that do a lot of the heavy lifting to a better server a couple months ago and TweetStats handled the 400% increase in usage like a champ. While perusing all the new users, I saw one guy that created a Wordle from his TweetCloud.

This was something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, and with that little motivation and new knowledge of Wordle’s advanced tools page … I tossed in some extra code, and added a link to create your own Wordle from your TweetCloud. Fun stuff. Here’s mine.