To quote Fred Flintstone, "That's the camel that broke the straw back."FHQ has finally broken down and joined the "tweeting" ranks. It may in fact just be a fad, but I can no longer justify shrugging the service off because of its overly short messages. In real time, nothing is more powerful for dispersing messages quickly and that has distinct ramifications in the political realm. We saw that with the Oklahoma Republican convention a few weeks ago. The mainstream media was not covering the GOP chair battle in Oklahoma -- the one that potentially would have had the party adopt a presidential caucus over the state-funded primary.
Plus, the political world seems to have adopted Twitter as well (see picture to the right). All of the possible candidates mentioned for the GOP nomination in 2012 have at least some presence on Twitter. In fact, you can now see their up-to-the-minute updates in FHQ's left-hand sidebar below the blogroll (Yes, way down there.). To go to the candidate's Twitter page simply click on the "about _ hours/minutes ago" link or just follow along here. I'll have more on this tomorrow, but for now a few notes about the sidebar gadget's functionality will suffice.
As for FHQ, you can add our Twitter feed (@FHQ) if you are so inclined (There is a link to the feed in the right sidebar above the Blog Archive). For now, my contributions will be confined to automatic postings of actual FHQ posts with attendant URLs, but that could change in the future. My feeling is, why deprive loyal FHQers of the opportunity to follow the site in a more mobile format if that's what they prefer.
Like I said, though, I'll have more on this tomorrow. In the meantime, have fun with the new gadgets.
NOTE: Also, please let me know if you experience any lags in site loading time when you're here. Adding these gadgets has slowed things down some and I want to keep tabs on that. Thanks.
Recent Posts:
Does the Sotomayor Choice Make Texas a Swing State?
Two Huckabee Slips in One Day?
Is Charlie Crist Running for Senate or Vice President?
Yes, the site's been a bit slow, taking about seven seconds before the text of the blog displays, as opposed to the 1-2 seconds it used to take. It really says something that that's considered slow. I personally don't mind.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I went back and forth yesterday. There are two routes to take and pros and cons each way. As is, you have the up-to-date tweets and links to the Twitter point of origin. The drawback is you have to wait every time you refresh the page or click to comment or whatever.
ReplyDeleteThe other way is to utilize the RSS feed that is provided by Twitter. You get the links there too, but there is the RSS delay that comes with that. For example, Gingrich's Twitter RSS had a tweet about McCain and North Korea up all day yesterday. That's fine, but we know that he had at least two Sotomayor-related comments up during the day, that the RSS was slow to update for whatever reason.
Meanwhile, Sarah Palin was tweeting up a storm and all of those were updated through RSS rather quickly. So there is some variability from user to user.
The question, then, is do you want to deal with the RSS delay or the site delay due to the Twitter gadget up now? I'm still torn. I'll give it a week or so and reevaluate then.
...if I'm not completely frustrated by that point.
I come to FHQ for your insights, not those of Mark Sanford.
ReplyDeleteAre you sure? And I thought you liked Sanford.
ReplyDeleteI overestimated my patience. This is too slow. A fix is on the way.
ReplyDeleteI like Sanford, but his message of fiscal conservatism palins in comparison to Huckabee's main political theme — his love of Jesus Crist. Huckabee's support of evangelicals will have to be newtralized by other candidates seeking the nomination, and there are pawlenty of them.
ReplyDeleteClever. Very clever, Jack.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of clever word usages, one I'm moderately surprised hasn't been used yet in relation to Sarah Palin (They've all been used seemingly.) is Sarah Palin Tall or Sarah Palin'd Tall. Now, why hasn't some industrious young wordsmith mashed up Sarah Palin and Sarah Plain and Tall? It seems so obvious. I think the answer might be that the proper context for its use has yet to arise.
Soon friends, soon.
This blog post does it, as does this and problably others, and "sarah palin and tall" gets 21,000 hits on Google. But few are in very popular blogs or mainstream media sources — the only one I found from the latter was this one from an Alaskan radio station's website from 2007, before Palin was Palin.
ReplyDeleteHa! My quick search of that a couple of weeks ago used the keywords "sarah palin tall". The book title uses the "and" but Palin's last name is pronounced in a way that doesn't really require the "and," in my head.
ReplyDeleteBut geez, quick or not, I should have at least thrown an "and" in there.