A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
7 November 2017
No, you won't need earplugs. But we'll be sending longer tweets for our Around The Horn column now that Twitter has raised the 140-character barrier to 280 characters. Longer Horn tweets at last.
When we first launched our Twitter feed we wanted to include the topics covered in any particular Horn. But it didn't take much testing to realize we'd always be over the 140-character limit.
Not by much, but always.
For our other stories the headline is descriptive enough for you to decide whether to click on the link to read more or not. But the Horn headline is always the same, so we wanted to let you know what it covered.
We never had that trouble with our RSS feed. And we certainly don't have it with our JSON feed either. Neither of them impose an arbitrary limit on feed items. And the Internet has not been brought to its knees.
To implement the change for Photo Corners, we had to chisel away at the Perl code that transforms mere ASCII text into the HTML you see on the site. That code pops the tweet into each story so when you click on the little birdie, you get a tweet formatted with the headline and link ready to share.
We simply distinguished the Horn from other articles to handle its tweet a little differently.
In testing the new feature today, we see it hasn't yet rolled out to Photo Corners. But when it does, we're ready.