dfeed

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:op.v6dq5dj9eav7ka at localhost.localdomain...
> On Sat, 10 Dec 2011 17:44:05 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu 
> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
>
>> One idea for Vladimir's dfeed: it would be great to automatically post 
>> the tweets of D_language to digitalmars.D.announce.
>
> Please don't involve twitter on the newsgroups.  If I wanted to follow D 
> on twitter, I'd sign up for a twitter account.

Ditto.

> I don't mind the twitter  feed on the front page, because I rarely ever 
> view that page, and it's  good to appeal to people already involved with 
> twitter.
>

I do enter through the front page a lot, and while I don't usually see the 
twitface feed (b/c I use FF2 with lots of crap-blocking plugins...and 
please, can I mention FF2 *ONCE* without some crusader deciding I need to be 
saved by "upgrade your browser" evangelism?), I do get the twit feed with 
other browsers and I'd be thrilled for it to disappear.

Even setting aside my own opinions of twitface (ie, that it's useless, 
moronic, aptly-named, and deserves to go out of business), there are still 
real issues with it:

- It *significantly* slows down the page load. I'll describe it this way: 
FF2 is well known to be super-slow compared to every other modern browser, 
including newer versions of FF. And yet, my twitface-blocking FF2 loads the 
page many times *faster* (it's *very* noticable) than *every* modern 
non-twitface-blocking browser I've thrown at it.

- I think it may be crashing Iron (ie, Chrome sans the malware). It's either 
the twit feed or the google translator, but something on the homepage is 
crashing Iron/Chrome for me (it happens after the main HTML/CSS loads and 
gets displayed).

- It's extremely visually-jarring. It doesn't fit the visual style of the 
rest of the page at all. Which might be acceptable on a minor sub-page, but 
it's no good for the language's primary entryway.

- People who care about twitface can subscribe to it themselves. Forcing it 
on everyone else is not only rude, but it effectively amounts to an 
advertisement for twitface right on D's homepage - which is grossly 
inappropriate (even regardless of anyone's personal opinions of twitface). 
It's no different from sticking "Drink Mountin Dew!" up on there.