Just wrote my first jQuery plugin!  Textpandable is a plugin that enables textareas to auto-resize to fit content.  Just load jQuery and Textpandable, and include the following Javascript:

$(’textarea’).textpandable();

…and voilà!  All of your textareas are expandable, like this:

Textpandable offers the following options:

• lineHeight: Specify the lineHeight of the textarea–as a Textpandable option or a CSS declaration.
• minRows and maxRows: Set limits to how small or big your textarea will expand to.
• padding: Set a number of extra rows to provide for “padding”.  1-2 rows is usually a good value.
• width: Number of characters to allow per line before adding an extra row.  If not set, Textpandable tries its best to determine safe values based on CSS declarations, col attributes, and/or pixel width.

Now, I’m calling this version 0.9 for a few reasons:  I haven’t tested this in IE yet, and I haven’t documented the code (although it’s really simple)…  but most of all, it’s not feature-complete: I want to get animations working.  Unfortunately, with animations turned on, any change in size causes the cursor position to skip to the end and/or lose focus.  I’m not experienced enough with the innards of jQuery to know why this would be happening.

It works just fine with the default speed setting of ‘0′ (as I’ve short-circuited the animation script in this case).  Anyone who gets animation working will be my hero!

Download Textpandable v0.9 (Dual-Licensed MIT & GPL)

Okay, well I officiallly twatted my first tweet over a year ago, but I’ve made it pretty clear that I’m not fond of the phenomenon.  While I have warmed up to it as a means of syndicating information–we are integrating the Twitter API into the news controller in Architeck–it still seems shallow as social networking goes.  (But then, “Shallow is the new two-oh,” so I’ve been told.)  Twitter’s biggest users?  Celebrities who like to hear themselves speak, old media news networks who aren’t even listening, and technophiles who–lets face it–are members on EVERY social networking site, and practically every free service on the Internet.

So, while @thomshouse has been around for a while, I’ve never had any desire to be an active user on Twitter.  Until now.  And it’s all Facebook’s fault.

Facebook is riding the fail whale today.

See…  I don’t want to walk down the street holding hands with Twitter, but I do want to maintain a presence.  Why?  I dunno.  I suppose I too like to hear myself speak.  Or perhaps I would like to have some content there, on the off chance that Twitter might become a major avenue of communication for me–say, because of a side project or freelance work.  I’m definitely a technophile, so that weird obsessive craving to tinker with everything is there, too.  But most of all I want to maintain a presence on Twitter because it should be effortless.  With social APIs left and right, I should be able to post my status on Facebook and see it updated on Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace–everywhere.

And that’s what I’ve been doing.  I update my status in Facebook, and through a roundabout process provided by a Facebook app called “Twitter Updater”, I’ve been able to see my status updates in Twitter, usually with less than a minute’s delay.

Until today.  Today I updated my FB status on my iPod, jumped into Tweetie to make sure it took, and…  nothing.  Checked again a few minutes later, and still no update.  Numerous posts have since appeared from the people I follow, and meanwhile, crickets chirp over my lack of an update.  I grew suspicious.  Logged into FB to investigate, and sure enough, the powers that be disabled Twitter Updater’s ability to function.

A little background: Facebook doesn’t make it easy to share your status with other services.  As I understand it, Facebook’s APIs expose the ability to update your status, but not to read it.  It would seem that applications used to have this ability, but it has since been disabled.  Twitter Updater got around this “shortcoming” (or crippleware?) by having you add a bogus friend–in my case, a Mister “Twitter Updater II”–to your friends list.  The application couldn’t read your status, but your friend T.U. sure could, and voila!  Twitter updates via Facebook.  At least, that’s how it did work.  Now, Facebook has disabled the friend accounts, supposedly on the basis that they “do not represent real people”.  They have also completely obfuscated access to your private “mini-feed”, an RSS file that can provide another means of export.

I believe, however, that this–and all other means to cut off access to Facebook status updates–is a result of (Facebook founder) Mark Zuckerberg’s love/hate relationship with Twitter.  Those that follow tech news probably know that Zuck was infatuated with Twitter as of last fall, that Facebook attempted to acquire Twitter with a $500 million stock deal, and that Twitter turned it down.  And Facebook users are all-too-aware of the much-maligned changes made to the home page recently, changes that seem designed to suspiciously resemble a Twitter-like functionality.

It seems to me that this crackdown on API status access and on services like Twitter Updater are just another piece of the puzzle.  There is no justifiable reason for Facebook to lock down status access.  Applications can already be granted access to your name, friends list, birthday, and who knows what else from your profile.  And if there’s anything Facebook’s done spectacularly, it is the detail and granularity of privacy controls to block or allow applications access to this information.  So it can’t possibly be a privacy concern.  No, it’s got to be a business model.  Facebook is blocking access to the status to prevent an exodus, or perhaps just to spite the competing service.  Mark Zuckerberg is the jealous, possessive lover: if he can’t have Twitter, no one can have Twitter.

...or maybe Zuck is like Kathy Bates in Misery?

I would love to be proven wrong.

I would love for someone to answer these two questions:

• What legitimate reason is there to cut off access to status updates?

• Won’t this move actually hurt Facebook?

I like Facebook.  I’m a UI snob, and I prefer its aesthetic. I would much prefer to use Facebook and be able to ignore Twitter altogether.  Is it really better for Facebook that I am now forced to “reverse the flow”, to update Twitter and spend less time directly on Facebook?  Because that’s what I’m doing now.  I am updating from Twitter, and using Facebook less often than I used to.  Good business model, FB.

Anyone who feels my pain or likes this article can follow me @thomshouse.  I’ll be on there a lot now, it seems!

I’m sorry, I officially fail at Twitter.

I’ve had my Twitter account since March of last year.  How many updates–or tweets, or whatever the hell they call it–have I posted?  Six.  Half of which are about “trying this Twitter thing again”.  Everybody seems crazy about it, but I just can’t get into it.

I can sort of understand the appeal.  The reason I gave up on the old version of my blog (which was personal, not tech/rant-related) was because it was too cumbersome…  I felt like I had to write a novel to justify posting anything.  So I looked at microblogs.  Tried Tumblr, and I liked the concept, although it was still enough like a blog that I rejected it for being a hosted solution.  (The original drive behind Escher was to develop an open-source microblog similar to Tumblr.)  I started using my long-dormant Facebook account and found a satisfying outlet via status updates.  Then Richie started talking up Twitter, so I tried it.

And I’ve tried it five more times since then, and I still can’t bring myself to like it.

Yes, I prefer Facebook.  I like having built-in mechanisms to find my friends.  I like Facebook IM…  Though I’ve only used it a handful of times, it’s smoother than playing tag through email or tweets or other offline messages, but less hassle than having to boot up one of a half-dozen existing IM clients.  And as for those privacy concerns, they’re not my concerns…  My dirty little secrets are few and far between, I have nothing to hide, and I’d like to think I have more sense than to upload the sort of information that could result in identity theft.

But this rant really isn’t about the things I like in Facebook.  It’s really about the things I hate in Twitter:

• It’s ugly.  You would think it would be too simple to be ugly–especially since it uses a down-to-earth font like Arial–but they have found a way to cram every ounce of ugly possible in 140 characters.  I hate “twitter litter”…  The stupid @ symbols prefixing half of all twitterfeeds, the tiny urls, even the stupid o_O googly-eyed default icon…  It’s an icon, it’s a PNG, capable of a millions of beautiful colors, or at least gradients galore!  Why make it look like more text?  Twitterfeeds, IMO, are uglier than MySpace profiles, and that’s saying a lot.  But at least with MySpace, there’s a chance to use your l33t stylesheet skills (or copy-paste ability) to make your profile look not-so-hideous.  I guess the difference is that Twitter is trendy or kinda “scene” despite its rough-hewn appearance–or perhaps because if it–like shopping  at vintage stores or something.
• It’s full of shit.  Literally.  I just asked Trish what she thinks about Twitter, and this was what she told me: “I’m taking a shit now.”  Let me clarify:  I didn’t walk in on her in the bathroom or anything.  That’s how Twitter reads to her.  People seem excited to post details both intimate and mundane…  Every “sneeze, fart, and hiccup.”  Her words, not mine!  But it’s true.  At least make it intimate–and juicy! I cringe at my old LiveJournal entries because they seem so self-absorbed, but at least there’s substance to them.
• It’s too short.  I suppose 140 characters sounds like a lot, but unless you’re rocking Dick & Jane levels of literary prowess, it’s about enough for two sentences, and very little flavor.  (In fact, Trish pointed out, that last sentence alone was too long–170 characters.)  If you’re reading this (or if you’ve given up by now, which I wouldn’t blame you for) you know that I like to rant.  So, if there’s something going on worth writing about, I’m probably going to need more than 140 characters to fill it.  I could be wrong, but it doesn’t seem like Facebook or MySpace have such a conservative limit.  And anyway, how hard would it be to truncate a status message with ellipses?  Plus, this 140-character business is the reason behind the recent popularity of tinyurls, which I loathe.
• It’s spammy.  I follow a whopping three people: two friends, and Leo Laporte.  I listen to Leo’s podcast, This Week in Tech, and like what he has to say.  But his tweets drown out my friends’ posts.  Granted, this can be an issue on Facebook too…  But on Facebook, I can “turn down the volume” on certain types of posts or on particularly spammy friends.
• It doesn’t seem terribly secure.  Again, I’m curious why people tolerate Twitter where they didn’t tolerate MySpace.  Sure, MySpace had plenty of exploits and phishing expeditions, but I never remember reading about an administrative account getting compromised–but Twitter admin accounts have been hacked.  I’m sure a lot of  the other “celebrity hacks” and etc. have been a matter of social engineering, not of technology, but I still blame Twitter.  Twitter more or less relies upon their API allowing third-party clients to provide updates, which gets people too used to typing their passwords into all different apps.  Twitter ought to develop some of their own clients and require third-party clients to go through a user-approval process, on a case-by-case basis, similar to how Facebook apps function.

This week, Facebook is rolling changes to their home page and fan pages, changes that seem targeted at making Facebook a “Twitter killer”.  Bring it on, I say…  Not because I want Facebook to become more like Twitter.  (I needn’t worry about that, Facebook is far too elegant to become like Twitter.)  No, I’d like to see everyone jump ship on Twitter so I can stop hearing about it.

And now, I think I’ll stop talking about it!