Way back in July, when I launched the CoasterBuzz Feed Silverlight app, I did some plumbing work to publish events (news, posts, photos, etc.) on the site as they happened. The hooks were pretty straight forward, and you could wire up any number of publishers to it. The only publisher I wrote at the time published the events to a database, which is what the feed app talks to. I always intended to publish to Twitter or Facebook or something as well, but never got around to it.
So last night I was screwing around, renewing some domain names together so I could use a 15% GoDaddy discount from one of the Revision3 shows, when I noticed that there was a .bz top-level domain. I don't have any idea if that's for a particular country, nor do I care. But if I put a cstr in front of it, it made for a nice short domain name: cstr.bz, ideal for publishing branded, short URL's for CoasterBuzz. It's stupid expensive at $25 a year, but whatever, I spend a lot more than that in a year on postage.
I built a very small ASP.NET MVC app to handle the requests and 301's, a couple of lines of SQL, and a new publisher that responds only to news events by making Twitter posts. That gets you nice headline publication with links like this one. That was so easy that I'm not sure why it took me six months to think to do it.
I still find Twitter to be of limited usefulness for me, but there's a lot of action there so I have to play along. I find myself mostly using it as a kind of searchable super RSS. For my socially critical "I'm taking a dump look at me" status updates, Facebook is more than adequate, and a hell of a lot more targeted. Oh, it's good for bitching about your cable company too. :)
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