Working on a very basic twitter background generator, right now focusing on how to get the sidebar width right. It is very much under use at my twitter handle @dipankarsarkar (http://twitter.com/dipankarsarkar). The core idea is to be abe to communicate more information about what i do as a person using the background image. Some features that I personally want are
- Transparency for the sidebar – The image underneath should be visible, right now its a grey opaque color.
- A right sidebar – After some research , I figured out that the safest and optimal width to cater for is 1200px, with the core content on the left sidebar though. More thoughts on that as I deploy some new changes.
- Better fonts – Although new fonts / languages can be deployed. The code is not flexible enough right now to add new fonts.
That is a long enough list for the day 
, attaching the background with this as well. Let me know in case having cool backgrounds excite you.
I was just having a look at some forums and saw some people talking about how to handle large parallel uploads. I have been having a look at this plugin which comes with NGINX and played around with it. Extremely useful if you use nginx in your stack and are getting killed by massive uploads.
Have fun!!
http://www.grid.net.ru/nginx/upload.en.html
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using System.Net;
using System.Web;
namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
System.Net.ServicePointManager.Expect100Continue = false;
Uri address = new Uri(“http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json“);
// Create the web request
HttpWebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(address) as HttpWebRequest;
request.Method = “POST”;
request.ContentType = “application/x-www-form-urlencoded”;
request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(“username”, “password”);
StringBuilder data = new StringBuilder();
data.Append(“status=from%20.net”);
// Create a byte array of the data we want to send
byte[] byteData = UTF8Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(data.ToString());
// Set the content length in the request headers
request.ContentLength = byteData.Length;
using (Stream postStream = request.GetRequestStream())
{
postStream.Write(byteData, 0, byteData.Length);
}
using (HttpWebResponse response = request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse)
{
// Get the response stream
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
// Console application output
Console.WriteLine(reader.ReadToEnd());
}
}
}
}
Code to post on twitter and kwippy using this simple C# program . Njoi.
If you notice i now have a RSS feed for kwippy on the sidebar. That is done by using RSS widget functionality within the wordpress theme section. The image below outline the complete setup which i use for my blog.
Its really simple to set this up .Enjoy.
Inspired by http://twistori.com/. I wrote a generic tool which will allow people to setup a simple wall where people can post and it will automatically refresh. I built this tool specifically because it was needed at proto.in. I am very sure it will be useful to a lot of people out there.
Uses JQuery and a Queues for javascript library. Maybe someone can do some transition magic with it, i am still a javascript n00b .
Here is the complete source code and demo. Please forgive the lack of documentation.