TweetChicago: Behind the Scenes

Last month the Law School announced its TweetChicago page, which collects together an ever-increasing number of our faculty and students’ 140-character-or-less musings on the micro-blogging service known as Twitter. Since then we’ve had several inquiries as to how we put this little experiment together, so here’s a real brief explanation.
TweetChicago is basically just built off of the standard HTML/javascript widget that Twitter makes (not-so-easily) available:

<div id=”twitter_div”>
<ul id=”twitter_update_list”></ul>
</div>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/username.json?callback=twitterCallback2&amp;count=5“></script>

Just change “username” above to the name of the user whose tweets you’d like to widgetize, change the “count=” to the number of tweets you’d like to display, and paste into your webpage.
Just like that, you have your first tweeter’s widget.

The tricky part comes in when you want to include multiple widgets on one page. Because of the way Twitter’s javascript is written, it will only call one tweeter’s feed on each page. You can get around this by creating a separate page for each tweeter (e.g., “tweeter1.html,” “tweeter2.html,” etc. You can then embed these pages in your aggregator page using iframes:

<iframe id=”tweeter1 src=”tweeter1.html>

Note that the tweeter’s individual pages will need to include a link to the .css file you’re using to style them, as the styles from the main page where you’re embedding the iframes will not apply to the pages contained within iframes.

This is not a terribly elegant — nor, unfortunately accessible — solution, but it’s the only way I could figure out to get around the one badge per page bug.

Concert Review: The Decemberists


No band I’ve ever seen has more fun on stage than the Decemberists. I’ve seen them four or five times over the last couple of years, and it’s always obvious that they are having an absolute ball. I had the chance to see them twice over this weekend, at Wheaton College on Halloween and then the next night at University of Chicago.

The Halloween show was a classic. It opened with a reenactment of “The Shining,” with singer Colin Meloy pedaling a Big Wheel onto the stage to be met by the creepy twins of drummer John Moen and bassist Nate Query (whom Meloy noted were likely the first two cross-dressers ever to appear on stage at famously conservative Wheaton College’s Edman Memorial Chapel).


With a setlist tailored to the evening, the highlight of the night was a version of “Shankill Butchers” featuring Jenny Conlee playing the chapel’s massive pipe organ. If you listen to the recording, you’ll hear the band launch next into “Culling of the Fold,” but I wasn’t able to record the whole thing, since during his frenzied stalking of the stage, Meloy reached out and grabbed my iPhone as I was trying to take a picture of him (my wife made me promise I’ll never wash it again).


The following night’s show was a bit less inspired — maybe it was the crowd of “Where Fun Comes to Die” students, or maybe it was just that we had to sit for part of the show instead of being right up at the front of the stage — but it was still great. The highlight of the U of C show was when Meloy grabbed a fan’s video camera and created an on-the-fly Public Service Announcement (the PSA starts about 5 minutes in). And they finished with a rousing — and inspiring — version of “Sons and Daughters” that had everyone in the crowd singing along.