Right. How am I going to explain this?

When I woke up this morning, I found something on Twitter about a new system called TweetBoard. I heard something about Alpha invites, allowing me to test their new service free of charge. Alpha is a geek word for experimental software. First, there’s only an idea. Then comes the Alpha release, Beta release, then the Release Candidate (RC) and finally the Ready to Manufacture (RTM). TweetBoard is still Alpha software… Good to know!

It took a while before it got to me. TweetBoard can best be described as a bridge between Twitter and your blog. I sent an Alpha request by using a specially formulated tweet:

Requesting an invite for Tweetboard Alpha (http://tweetboard.com) by @140ware, for my site: http://www.daepunt.com

If you want to have a go at this for your own blog, copy the request tweet e x a c t l y, but don’t forget to replace the URL of my weblog with yours. About a minute or so later I received the following message:

@daepunt, your Tweetboard Alpha invite request has been approved. Find installation instructions here: http://bit.ly/1JtNr

I followed the instructions. My weblog runs on WordPress and the instructions said that I should make a Text Widget and copy/past a piece of JavaScript in it. I did that and it worked, but it left me with an ugly and empty Text Widget, so I pasted the code in the footer.php instead and now it looks nice and clean. If you check out the left side of my blog, you’ll notice a coloured tab and if you press it…