There's a new version of Little Pork Chop that runs on the Mac desktop.

It's called Electric Pork.

There's no whitelisting, so you can use it right away. All the tweets come from your machine and don't pass through the server, so there should be no trouble scaling. As before we don't retain any of your Twitter login info.

Read more about Electric Pork in this blog post, or download the software and get started right away.

1. The big new thing in Little Pork Chop v0.57 is whitelisting. If your Twitter account isn't on the whitelist you won't be able to post. You can ask to be on the whitelist by posting a comment here. Please read the instructions carefully.

2. In addition, it's been built with a new set of libraries. This should be a transparent change, but you never know. Be on the lookout for problems, and please let me know what you were doing when you hit the problem, what you expected to happen, and what actually happened.

3. And it's now at a new shorter URL: pork.io. It should automatically redirect from the old address to the new one.

Sorry -- we're no longer whitelisting people for Little Pork Chop. There's a new product called Electric Pork, it does the same thing as Little Pork Chop, but it runs on your Mac. Read more about Electric Pork in this blog post, or download the software and get started right away.

11/19: It's coming back. See this post for details.

There was a major increase in use of Little Pork Chop a couple of weeks ago, when it was discovered by spammers, apparently as a way of working around Twitter's spam detection system? I don't know. But thousands of messages were going out every hour, most of them spam, directed at individuals in many cases. I never anticipated that it would be used primarily in this mode, and it's totally not something I want to support.

Perhaps I'll find time to make Little Pork Chop an invite-only affair, rather than being open to the world. I'm sure it's not hard to do, but I already am over-committed. If you have a strong feeling about it, please post a comment below. But if you're a spammer, wanting to use it for spam, please don't plead your case. Pointless.

Dave

What's new

There's now a RSS feed for items you post via Little Pork Chop.

This means you should be able to subscribe to these items in an RSS reader app or website. I have already done so with River4, and verified that it works.

Here's an example feed, the one for my test account. You can see there are already a few items in the feed.

How to

Click the gear icon in the left margin.

Click the Feed panel.

You should see a set of preferences for your RSS feed. Change the defaults if you like, or just click OK to accept them.

Post something via Little Pork Chop.

Go back to the Feed panel. Now you should see a Feed URL filled in, in the last entry. That's the URL you should subscribe to in the feed reader, or give to your friends to follow.

The new version has been released.

Release notes are here.

Thanks to Levi Notik for this really excellent bug report, on Twitter, including a screen shot that led me straight to the problem.

A half-finished feature caused Little Pork Chop to fail, if an internal object was not initialized. I was able to reproduce the problem immediately and fix it. Tested, and verified that it works.

As a result I expect that the app will work for some people for whom it did not work previously. Sorry for the screwup. I'll try to be more careful in the future.

If you want to give it a try, be sure you reload the app to get the new version. The version number is in the upper right corner of the page.

I've had a couple of reports from users having problems with Little Pork Chop on Sunday evening. If you're having trouble too, and want to help get to the bottom of it, here's what you should do:

1. Reload the LPC page. This is the equivalent of quitting and relaunching an app in a desktop OS.

2. Try logging off Twitter and log back on. It's possible a token expired, if so, this will fix that.

3. If you're still having problems, and don't mind getting a little technical, open the browser's Console window, and if you see error messages, after failing to get a tweetstorm published, take a screen shot and post them here as a comment. That will help nail down the problem. Here's what such a screen shot might look like (without the errors).

I'm pretty sure I solved the problem with URLs included in Little Pork Chop tweetstorms.

First, I had to detect them. I used a code snippet from Douglas Crockford's JavaScript book.

Then I had to call Twitter to find out how long a shortened URL would be. They told me.

I had LPC do the math. And I'm pretty sure now it gets it right, and if you include URLs in your tweets, no matter how you specify them, we'll figure it out and compute the length of each tweet correctly.

But I have to put in the usual disclaimers. When you think you have a problem solved, it only serves to uncover another problem. So my fingers are crossed.

Thanks again to William Mougayar for helping me track down this issue.

We found a problem in Little Pork Chop, proving that even the simplest software snack can have bugs. This one is not so easy to address, so I decided to document it so people know how to work around it.

The problem occurs when you include a partial URL in your stream, something like buff.ly/1tHnJWW. When we shoot that up to Twitter as part of a storm, it recognizes it as a URL, replaces it with a t.co URL and then if we're right at the margin of 140 chars calls it an error because the tweet is longer than 140. Why? Because there's no http:// on the original URL so that didn't figure into our count of characters. Once it replaced it, the new URL has the http:// in front, and that appears to be what forces it over the limit.

I have to write code that recognizes that as a URL and figures in the number of extra characters, and not send so many to Twitter, but until that's in the product, you should always include the http:// at the beginning of URLs and everything should be okay.

Thanks to William Mougayar for very patiently working this out with me. And stay tuned for the fix.

It had been a few weeks since there was an update to Little Pork Chop.

1. Previously the total count of tweets would sometimes be wrong, especially if you deleted a lot of text in the stream. This should be fixed now, and the total count should be correct in all circumstances.

2. There's now a blog just for Little Pork Chop, and an RSS feed you can subscribe to if you want to keep up on changes. Previously I had been posting updates on Scripting News.

I've been playing around with browser-based Twitter writing tools for a while, and finally have something to show for it. A cool little app called Little Pork Chop.

http://pork.io/

Say you have a complicated idea to express, too much to fit in a 140-character tweet. Go to Little Pork Chop, and type it in. Edit it, tweak it up. As you're typing you'll see a preview of how it's going to break up your text into 140-character tweets. You can add a "hard" return anywhere to cause it to start a new one.

Do a little editing. Think about it a bit. Are you ready?

If so, hit the blue button and Little Pork Chop sends your tweets out to the world, one per second. No delays.

As I developed it, I sent lots of tweets to my test account. And early this afternoon, it was ready for me to trust it with my main Twitter account. I put out two mini-storms, nothing like a @pmarca burst, and everyone seemed to be happy. No clue, apparently that I was using anything special to do it.

Important

We don't retain any information about you, nor do we retain any ability to post to Twitter, or read anything from your Twitter account. That information is stored locally only on your own computer. You can erase it simply by signing off.

If you use Little Pork Chop to post to a private Twitter feed, read this important note.

Why Little Pork Chop?

1. There's a bigger pork chop lurking in the shadows.

2. I like the name.

3. It has the word "chop" in it, which is what it does -- chops your tweets into delicious 140-character morsels.

Version 0.42

A new version is out with lots of fixes and features.

Version 0.48

New version supports hashtags.

Questions?

If you have any questions or comments, post them on this page.

Please read the comment guidelines to be sure you're not spamming us. Thanks!