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Feb
22
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I think Tom Merritt, Molly Wood, and Leo Laporte’s Twitter novel is a nifty idea. However I really don’t like reading it from the bottom up. The RSS feed wasn’t much more help – you still have to click on each “post” to read it. What was I do to? Well, with little PHP trickery and WordPress wonderfulness, I was able to parse the RSS feed in such a way as to strip out the “140novel:” at the beginning of each tweet as well as the sometimes-present “#t” (or “#m” or “l”) at the end of each tweet. Eliminating these two conventions makes for a nice linear reading experience. You can view the “book” version of 140novel on my appropriately-titled 140novel page.
Now the question I’m faced with is this: where are paragraph breaks in a Twitter novel? Right now it’s just one stream of sentences. There are no hints from the authors as to where to make these breaks so I guess it will just have to be a big jumble of text.
UPDATE: So it seems that only a certain number of the most recent tweets are fed into the RSS feed. Therefore the story doesn’t—and never did—start from the beginning as it appeared on my 140novel page and it would continue to cut off more and more from the beginning as more posts are added. Not sure how to fix this. I’m a little upset because the code works. The story is formatted perfectly. It’s just the RSS feed that is the issue.
