New features on Tweeted Links

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been implementing a few new features on Tweeted Links. I actually released them last week, but forgot to write up a follow-up post 🙂

First of all there is a new design. The old one was hacked together in about 5 minutes, so this is kind of a relief. It was made by my old friend James Deer for a project we worked on together a few years ago, but never got around to finishing. It looks a lot friendlier than the old design, so hopefully people won’t be scared off it anymore.

Next up, it now separates different types of links, so articles are separated from pictures and music. This is probably the biggest new feature for me in this release, as before you were inundated with links and didn’t really know too well what they were. Previews are shown for pictures as well which I quite like. I’m looking to extend this for other media types as well, for example checkins and videos. If you have any other requests let me know!

There have also been a couple of changes behind the scenes, link expanding for example is a lot more robust than it was before (old links have been reprocessed), so more articles should be picked up. I’m currently working on rewriting the Tweet fetcher to use the streaming API, so that new links will appear near enough at the same time as they are posted to Twitter. I am also going to add pagination (of some sort, I’m thinking infinite scrolling) to the list of links, as some people have quite a lot of links. My list of images, for example, takes quite a while to load and for the browser to render.

I’m still wondering where to take this in the future, so I am open to any suggestions or requests you may have! One thing I was thinking of doing was making the link expander and detail fetcher thingy (I need someone to explain that in a marketing way) publicly accessible, if something like this had existed in the first place I wouldn’t really have to have built Tweeted Links!