There is now a twitter stream for Gallimaufry of Whits, @OfWhits. I didn't come up with the account name, Twitter suggested it. Tweets are posted using a loose collection of potential encoding bugs which I call WhitsBot, which is registered as a Twitter app.

I wanted to use @sbp to administer WhitsBot, but that turned out to be a pain in the buttocks because you have to use the API instead of the website to generate tokens. I'm using pypi's twitter package by Mike Verdone, which is a little idiosyncratic for something so simple, but it appears to work. I haven't tested utf-8 yet. Perhaps I should do a post about the supercombiner.

WhitsBot also publishes drafts to the Whits site, and updates the old fashioned Atom feed. There's nothing at the moment to update the Whits front page.

Twitter is not very stable, and perhaps too trendy for this to be as useful as the Atom feed despite that format going out of fashion. At least it's easy to check how many users the Twitter feed will pick up.

The tweet content also serves as a meta description, which is picked up by search engines. Unfortunately, using Twitter limits the entry to 119 characters, 140 minus 20 for a shortened url and one space, whereas the most limiting search engine, in this case Bing, allows 150 characters in a meta description.