Matthew Martin (who has guest posted here previously) made a nifty button you’ll now find on TIE and on his blog. His explanation:
What started essentially as a Twitter dare a while back between Austin and me has lead to the creation of the first-ever Tweetable button, which you can now find at the bottom of every post on TIE as well as my own blog, Separating Hyperplanes.
When you click one of these buttons, it will highlight all of the sentences in the post that are short enough to tweet and link directly to Twitter with both the text and the post’s URL already loaded. All you have to do is click the Tweetable button, then click on the highlighted sentence you want to tweet.
When a sentence highlights in Twitter-blue, that means that the sentence and link fit into no more than 140 characters. Sentences that are “almost-Tweetable,” meaning that they are more than 140 characters but less than 150, with the link included, will show up in off-white instead of blue, and will of course have to be edited down for size, but otherwise work the same.
I did the programming, so if you have technical issues, then tweet me @hyperplanes or email me. But if you think we’ve unleashed evil on the world, the idea was all Austin’s.
Give it a try below, if you’re reading this on TIE, as opposed to in your RSS reader or in an email. If you’re doing either of those things, click over to the blog and then try it. As for this being evil, it kinda is. I want what I think are very good sentences to also be tweetable. That’s going to affect my writing, though rarely. Only about 1 out of 1,000 of my sentences is any good.*
* Each of the last three sentences was edited for tweetability. Also grammar. See? Evil.
