@hg47's Blog: The Tweet & The TakeAway - Posts Tagged "twitterart"

Try to fail in an upward direction.

I have no "New Year's Resolutions." But I am putting together a bunch of promotional experiments to run. Most or all of them won't "work."

When I try to promote my written work, I feel like I'm the Village Idiot: "Read my book, please?" Whoever I say that to grabs my book out of my hand and slaps me in the face with it, then throws my book into the mud.

But, if I'm climbing a hill, or climbing stairs, and I fall down, I'm failing up, aren't I?

This is actually my favorite sort of tweet.

Minimalist.

Lots of space. The #TwitterArt reinforces the actual message. Best of all, for my ego, I'm doing tricks that no one else even knows how to do on Twitter! And, yes, I prefer the clean look of a tweet without hashtag.

Actually, there are at least 5 #TwitterArt (ists) who know how I am doing these sorts of "special effects." Two artists, I explicitly confessed to via DM. Two long-time #140art heavy-hitters know me well enough to have sussed me out: my guess is they leave me alone because of respect, or fear, or their own personal integrity.

What? People can't have integrity? By the time you read this, it will be 2013: I proclaim this the year of integrity! @hg47

In Feb 2010 I found a hack to do minimalist #TwitterArt …Twitter just shut down my exploit. Never date & break-up with a Twitter Admin!

Guy Vincent - https://twitter.com/Guy_Vincent - discovered sometime early in 2010 an em-width space, that when you put a bunch of them together, Twitter would treat as a word, meaning the group of spaces wouldn't break. This made it possible for a tweet to be several lines high with just a few visible characters.

Then I discovered that I could start a line with a hard-space, but that the non-breaking space could not be copy/pasted, but had to be entered into the composition window by the Alt-0160 code. What I hadn't appreciated until recently was that this procedure made my antics on Twitter difficult to reverse engineer. Anyone who copy/pasted my tweets trying to steal them, would get non-functional tweets, because Twitter treats the hard space when pasted as a soft space.

Anyway, we're in a new era. Twitter's recent upgrade went to an active composition window, that changes a lot of things, and the hard space no longer functions (or if it does, I haven't found a way to use it yet). I found a temporary work-around of limited value. I don't really understand the new composition window; but I shouldn't feel bad, different browsers don't seem to understand it too well either; the rendering differences between Firefox & Chrome just got a lot more varied. Call me paranoid, but I suspect Twitter will soon shut-down my work-around. Cheers! @hg47

Links to my early #TwitterArt:

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/twit...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/mini...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/worl...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/art-...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/cate...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/in-t...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-t...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/obam...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/deve...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/play...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/turb...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/why-...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/why-...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/pre-...