Monday 29 July 2019

capturing a tweet thread ...

Every day I run a set of automated google alert searches on topics that I'm interested in - Greek and Roman Archaeology, medieval history. Egyptology and a couple of others.

A few years ago these would regularly pick up something interesting on someone's research blog, and I would start following their RSS feed, and I'd also quite often clip and store interesting material into one of my pack rat notebooks on Evernote or OneNote.

Well, it's 2019, and people don't write blogs anything like as much, but interesting things are still happening out there, but quite often what's happening that's cool is published as a twitter thread, and not as a blog post:

For example I've just read a fascinating thread on bringing Ancient Egyptian yeast back to life, which pushed my buttons in so many ways.

But it's a thread and that's a problem - how do you capture the thread to save to an online notebook, or indeed print offline to read on the train ?

Well I've found and used two solutions

Spooler - https://tinysubversions.com/spooler/

and

Threadreaderapp = https://threadreaderapp.com/

Both work more or less the same, and both produce threads that can be saved to OneNote with the OneNote web clipper, or printed to a pdf.

One little gotcha is that if you have an image heavy thread you need to check that all the images are loaded before either saving to OneNote/Evernote or printing to pdf, otherwise you end up with a pile of blank rectangles where the pictures should be. OneNote's preview function is useful here for checking that your clip contains what you really want.

The major difference between the two is that threadreader doesn't force you to login with your twitter account to use the application while spooler does.

Spooler wants the url of the last tweet in the thread, Threadreader wants the first - all in all Threadreader feels a little better supported and a little more sophisticated, but that's about it - it does offer some options to save and download your threads if you login, but you don't need to.

Both do the job so it's really a coin toss as to which to use ...




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