Blips.

It’s funny what putting the “web in your pocket” (dirty!) makes you reconsider.

For example, Twitter. Before iPhone (BiP), it was undeniably cool to be able to text status updates to my website. Where am I? What am I doing? Just check my home page! Oh look, I’m downtown, taking pictures. Or mowing the lawn. Or driving to DC. Or driving from DC.

Wicked cool, I tell you. And for many users of Twitter, it really was, because the service would spit those updates right back out into a variety of places - SMS, IM, web, even email. But for folks like me, with normal, sane friends who do not need to know my every move, that’s not very useful.

I found that I very much enjoyed the minimalism of Twitter. 140 characters encourages you to post without having to think too much about it.

But there were a lot of things about it that I didn’t like, especially when they changed their badges so that you couldn’t publish private tweets somewhere else. (This was the infamous login problem on my homepage.) Why put it all somewhere else for the world to pick over with their APIs and fancy-schmancy web services … all because you like texting in the entries?

I’ve been hitting the mobile Twitter site on my iPhone this week, when finally it hit me. Why do I need this if 1) no one I know in real life uses it, and 2) I already have a blog? I can send out tweets blips all I want now that I have an actual web interface at my disposal!

(I dunno. Sometimes these things take a while for me to put together. )

Anyhow, I whipped up a template in Movable Type this afternoon to put these little blips into practice, using some of the twitter badge javascript to make things look the same. They’ll be where the tweets were (on the home page) but blips will show up in the logs, too. I’ve hidden them on the home page to keep things simple, but will have to figure out how to remove them from the individual archives later.

Right. As you were.