Today Twitter sent me a note to let me know in advance that there would be changes starting on August 31. Hmm. I just checked the calendar and it is September 2 already. So what is with this email delay??? Thanks for letting me know in advance of your changes. Not. How about next time, trying to send the notice before the change takes place? How hard is that?

The notice was in part designed to alert users to a change in authentication for application requiring the use of OAuth. And they thoughtfulkt told me that some applications might not work after August 31. Sure enough they broke my iPhone’s Twitterific application. It was an older version and so I updated to the latest version. When I first tried to login with the application, the login failed. Twitter’s notice neglected to mention that you no longer can be logged in to your web account and use a mobile application to login at the same time. Way to go. With that solved, I was able to access Twitterrific again.

The notice also related that in coming weeks Twitter will deploy a link wrapping service and that by the end of the year all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL. Notably, the notice did not include any discussion of privacy. If all link clicks are going to be logged and redirected via a Twitter service, what kind of privacy protections are there going to be??

The notice also does not include any provision for how to contest any URL blocking that may occur. They say that the links will be checked to see if the destination site is known to contain malware and then forward you to the destination URL. This is good in theory, but begs the question of what happens when a site is wrongly listed as containing malware? At the same time it gives Twitter the chance to block sites it simply doesn’t like. There ought to be a provision for challenging any blocks or an ability to opt-out.

Quick summary of what’s new at Apple – announced today.

• New iOS 4.2 coming in November.
  • WiFi printing
  • HD Video Upload over WiFi
  • High Dynamic Range Photos
  • Game Center
• 
  New iPods coming in time for holidays.
  • New iPod Shuffle
    
    
    Small, wearable 2 GB iPods with 15 hours play times with clip-on
  • New iPod Nano
    
    
    Small version of iTouch, 8GB and 16GB models, six colors, 24 hours play times, clip-on
  • New iPod Touch
    
    
    • Retina Display
    • Apple A4 chip
    • 3-axis Gyro
    • iOS 4.1 with Game Center
    • FaceTime with forward camera
    • 40 hours play time
    • 8, 32, and 64 GB models
  • Pre-Order iPods Today
• iTunes 10 Launching with New Logo
  • New Social Network called Ping for Music – Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes – social music discovery w/160 million iTunes users
  • Customized top ten charts of what people you follow are downloading
• Apple TV
  
  
  
  • New version – about 1/4th the size
  • Matte Black
  • WiFi 802.11n
  • Remote
  • All rentals – no storage management
  • Streaming – no syncing
  • Everything in HD (when available)
  • $4.99 movies and $.99 TV shows
  • Integration with NETFLIX, YouTube, flickr, mobileme, and Rotten Tomatoes reviews
  • $99
  • Pre-order now – available in four weeks
• AirPlay
  • Can push video from iPad to iTV

Adding an avatar/icon/image for your author and categories in WordPress is pretty easy, but does require editing your theme’s php templates and creating images with the right names in the right locations. Posts on this blog use this code to accomplish the task:

For this to work there has to be a corresponding image for your author with the same name as the user and a corresponding image for each of your categories using the name of the page for each category. In my case I use numbers where there is a page_id and the category images use the same number as their names.

Chances are good you don’t have to pay full price for whatever you are buying online, if there is a box for a discount code or coupon number. Enter RetailMeNot with coupon codes for over 65,000 stores.

When updating some software lately, I was able to quickly find a coupon code that saved me $17 on my purchase. Definitely a site worth a bookmark for me. Just out of curiosity, I checked to see whether they had some hefty discounts like 50%. You bet – found 16 sites where they have 50% off coupons.

While those huge discounts are an exception, the average discount on the site seems to run 10-15% depending on the type of item. So don’t fret if you’ve lost a bit of junk mail, deleted an email with a discount code, or can’t find one you saved. This place probably has what you want. If not, fire up Google and search on “discount codes” to get to other similar sites with coupon and discount codes. Money in your pocket!

After updating a Word Press plugin, I noticed that Twitter will stop allowing unauthenticated and automated tweets on August 30. Now to be fair, Twitter is doing a good thing by requiring some form of authentication and I applaud the idea! This is good for the community. Now for the other shoe – yes it had to drop.

Twitter’s method for authenticating requires a “developer” a/k/a Word Press blogger to create a Twitter Application using a form on it’s developer website. Okay, shouldn’t be too hard right? Not so fast – boy was I wrong. Apparently, the web team at Twitter forgot a basic rule of webmasters – Test it on multiple platforms with multiple browsers to make sure it works. Just because it works on your developer workstation, doesn’t mean it is going to work for the average end-user out on the Internet.

The first part of the form requires one to fill out a half-dozen or so fields of information and then click on register application. In theory Twitter’s API Terms of Service should appear and you should be able to click agree to complete the process. The first annoying thing was that on clicking the “Register Application” button, it appeared that nothing had happened. Hmm – why? The problem was that the terms opened up below the button and out of sight as illustrated below – bad design.

Worse, the terms of service was missing its Decline and Accept buttons entirely. So I tried this out with several browsers and was, to put it mildly, very frustrated by the poor coding in evidence.

• Internet Explorer 8 – No buttons
• Internet Explorer 8 in Compatibility Mode – Text for Decline and Accept in a layer below another link to a countdown clock
• Google Chrome – no buttons
• Firefox – Current Version – no buttons
• Firefox Minefield – Version 4 Beta – no buttons
• Safari – Current Version – no buttons

Well that was pretty disappointing. Every browser I had was unable to submit the form.

Finally, I remoted into a server I run out West and used Internet Explorer 7 and that worked. What kind of web designer turns out a form that can only be used in one browser and one that is out-of-date? Somebody’s not cooking with gas at Twitter.

A lot of this could have been prevented by following the KISS rule (Keep It Simple Stupid) and presenting the terms of service up front as a page that must be visited prior to displaying the form in much the same way as a modern CAPTCHA works. It isn’t hard, doesn’t require complicated code and doesn’t usually land you in CSS hell.

Aside from problems with the developer site at Twitter, the main site also seems to having its share of problems. In the image below you can see the way pages are presented part of the time to the left and the way they are supposed to look to the right. This seems to be happening all too often these days.

One thing that I noticed was that parts of the page were loading from five different servers, maybe that is part of the problem. Whatever it is, it is annoying and makes one wonder whether Twitter is able to keep up with growing demand for its services.

It is a useful service and one that provides a lot of brief and valuable snippets of information. I can only hope that these issues get turned around and soon.