Twistory with a twist

For some time now, I was looking for some fine decoration to enlighten our freshly painted white walls.
I'm a DIY-guy - and that includes the things I like to put on the wall. (Next to the sometimes huge paintings of the kids)
I don't want to call it art - and most certainly not ART - but more like "expression"
But what?
It should be abstract - yet meaningful
It should be playful - yet not too swirly
It should be colorful - but not too much
It should be about me - yet not too geeky in an obvious way
It should be about the idea - not the craft of making it.
a bit like Conceptual Art - but without the big theories, after all .. I hardly take myself seriously that often.

Returning from mobilewebcamp with a head full buzzing ideas - I was fiddling around with the excellent Twistory from Tijs Vrolix.
I made a quick and dirty iCalender parser in asp/VBscript last year to display an Outlook year schedule on a school website, so I tweaked the script somewhat to display the twistory iCalendar output.
Great! an overview of all ones tweets of a full year on one calendar page. Maybe interesting for some future project.

And then it hit me: that's it!
I really like twitter, and it's the perfect not-too-serious input for some graphical views.

The plan: After 1 year of twittering, I'll collect the whole bunch in a 1-year calendar view.
The number of tweets a day get a color, the more tweets, the darker the color.
So you get a grid of colored blocks that represent a full year of your life.
If I would look at it - I'll see that dark spot and remember - Ah yes! that was the webcamp-day - great fun!
Or that was the week I didn't twitter because I was walking the nevada desert .. or something.
Perfect! Geeky, but only if you know what it means and - very important - not to be taken too seriously.
Twitter Art !

Of course twistory has to run for some time to collect data, and mine is only 4 days old. Tijs' twistory goes back 1 month so let's take that as example: week-view, month-view, week-view with less detail, coloured view (which will grow in time)
It's there for your enjoyment - works with all twistory accounts, or with any other iCalendar data for that matter (so you could graphicalise your outlook) - or, as it was meant to do: view your entire twitter backlog on a simple page.

http://www.stef.be/twistoryviewer/

I'll post the iCalendar parsing script after I cleaned it up (a bit)
Any nice ideas for other usages? lemme know!Cultuur, Graphics, in English, Scripting, Twitter, Web 2.0Reacties (1)