A Day in the life of Zach Whalen

This is a twitter stream explaining a day in the life of Dr. Zach Whalen when he has to advise two students, Carah Counts and Alaina Sur, on their independent study. Jim Groom also makes an appearance as somewhat of devil’s advocate.

Here is the web version of the story. (Special thanks to Martha Burtis who helped me figure out how to post it online!)

And here is the screenshot version of it. (I recommend reading it from bottom to top)

 

 

 

Creation Process:
This idea came about because my roomie Elena South and I are actually doing an independent study with Dr. Whalen this semester and sometimes given our topic we are studying, we discuss very odd things. This twitter feed is an alternate reality version of some of our conversations taken to the extreme. However in real life Elena and I are not creepy stalkers, I promise!

The story was written by Elena and I on typewithme.com so we could edit it together in real time. Once we had the story, it was up to me to change the twitter feed using Firebug. Let me tell you, this took forever. For some reason I kept  accidentally screwing up the code when I tried to edit it in notepad++. There’s a lot of information I needed to change on this story in order for it to work and it definitely wasn’t easy. I ended up having over 40 saved html files as backups for everytime I would change stuff and save it. But, even thought it took a long time, I am really happy with the results.

Oh and if you click/type  the link in the tweet when Jim Groom talks about Carah’s Flickr feed it will take you to a real picture of a snake with it’s fangs out.

Special thanks to Martha Burtis’s great tutorial!

Written by Cali4beach

7 comments
  1. This is brilliant. And I know that using Twitter introduces some issues when you’re dealing with the code — as far as I can tell it has to do with that automatic feature that loads more tweets when you scroll to the bottom of the twitter stream on a page. A few other people have been struggling with it. When I did something like this in Twitter last year, it was a lot easier, but that was before this feature was added.

    What did Dr. Whalen think of it?!

    • thanks martha! I tried it and the code worked in terms of I was able to see all tweets on the webpage, but at the same time it got rid of the carebear background and some of the formatting.

      I tried moving the code to several places in the HTML document but it didn’t seem to fix anything.

      Any further suggestions?

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