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A New ds106 Daily Create Tweet Clock


cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by ihave3kids

GNA had a good idea for the ds106 Daily Create scheduling…

I had been thinking about the timing of when they are published; it has been 10:00 AM EST from the beginning, aiming likely at our students in Fredericksburg, and/or first thing in the morning for the west coast, and something totally inconvenient for people in other time zones.

Here is the thing about time zones– no matter what time you schedule something, it will be a crappy time for people elsewhere on the globe.

That is a problem I cannot fix.

But is a good thing to have the TDC planted in your head early, so I have just modified the site, so new ones are released earlier, 5:00 AM EST. We do this in WordPress as scheduled posts, so it was easy to tweak in my script that creates new ones; the ones already in the queue were edited in the dashboard.

This means for North American, your TDC will be waiting for you when you wake up. Most of you. For friends in the Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Zanzibar… well maybe still not optimal.

But as GNA suggested, it would help to have the @ds106dc tweets repeated at reasonable intervals. I set up dlvr.it to send the tweets based upon the RSS feed from the site, so as soon as new ones are published, the tweet will go out (within an hour, the is the frequency it checks the feed).

I could not find an option in dlvr.it to repeat a tweet, so with some poking around, I came across http://tweko.com/. With this service, any tweet that goes out from this account with a #tweko hash tag will be repeated 2 more times at 8 hour intervals.

I will know in a day if it works.

But now, you have fewer excuses for not doing your daily exercise!


cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Giulia Forsythe

Especially the artist of that image 😉

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An early 90s builder of the web and blogging Alan Levine barks at CogDogBlog.com on web storytelling (#ds106 #4life), photography, bending WordPress, and serendipity in the infinite internet river. He thinks it's weird to write about himself in the third person.

Comments

  1. When I was doing ds106 I wished the Daily Create showed up earlier. By 10 am I am surprisingly far into my day and my most likely time to be creative and stop and think is before 6 am. I will be curious to see if this showing up early prompts me to actually do some DCs or if I still just think about them.

  2. Give it a try. There is no reason though to tie yourself to the current day; get in a cycle of doing the previous day? That way you get more examples to check out

  3. This is great! I want to say the 10am thing was a direct rip of daily shoot but I might be wrong and just pulled a time out of my ass when setting up the site. I like this approach much better.

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