In recent months microblogging has made a big splash; even US presidential candidates have discovered the power of the phenomenon. One of the most popular microblogging systems is twitter, where people write about their daily activities in chunks of 140 characters. However, twitter employs proprietary software, which hinders its improvement.
Laconica is open source microblogging server software. It is the basis of identi.ca and a number of other microblogging systems such as the TWiT Army Canteen. Participants in the TWiT Army can read and write Canteen posts via the web. It is also straightforward to participate using a nice application called twhirl, which is based on Adobe AIR. Twhirl allows anyone on a Windows, Mac or Linux machine to read and write TWiT Army Canteen posts efficiently, including the public timeline.
Here are step by step instructions for setting up twhirl with your TWiT Army account. You can also use twhirl to post to identi.ca and twitter accounts, but that is outside the scope of this tutorial.
Before you get twhirl, get the most recent version of Adobe AIR. Installing Adobe AIR on your system is necessary because twhirl will not work without it. (Note: you will need administrator privileges to do this.)
Also, ensure that you have signed up for a TWiT Army Canteen account. It is easiest to sign up for a TWiT Army account on the web. We recommend obtaining a user ID and password (many users have reported difficulties using OpenID).
Get the most recent version of twhirl. Install it on your computer. (Note: you will need administrator privileges to do this.)
Open the accounts dialog box. To do this, locate the top left of the twhirl window and click on the swirly icon or the twhirl name.
Select "laconi.ca" from the drop-down list at the bottom left hand corner of the accounts dialog box.
Type in your username, with "@army.twit.tv" at the end (omit the quotes). For example, if your chosen username is "john" then you would enter your username as "john@army.twit.tv". (Note: don't forget the @army.twit.tv part!) The picture example below would be suitable if your username is "twhirl" :-
Press Return or click the "+" button to save the information.
To log in for the first time, open the Account dialog box (like you did above). Then, select your new Army account in the list, and click on Connect. This will open up a new window for your Army account. If you don't like the size of this window, just click and drag the bottom right of the window to set its size to your personal taste.
To view the public timeline in your TWiT Army account window, click on the starry button to the right of "Home" in the button bar at the bottom. By default, twhirl will automatically update the public timeline together with your user timelines. If you prefer not to get public timeline updates, you can disable the automatic updating in the "Network" tab in the Account configuration section.
Note: you can disable the noises for the incoming message alerts! First, locate the top right of your Army window in twhirl, and focus on the spanner icon to the right of your username (e.g. "john@army.twit.tv"). Click on the spanner icon. This will bring up your Configuration window. Select the Notify tab in the Configuration window. Un-check the box for audio notifications (or set the settings to taste). Click "Save" at bottom to save your settings.
The twhirl team makes new versions available through the automatic update process, so twhirl will find out about the new release the next time you start it. To manually install this version, please go to the twhirl website and use the installation badge in the "Get twhirl" box.
twhirl now also supports incoming messages tracked via the popular IdentiSpy service by Dustin Sallings. Just use the same account for IdentiSpy that you added to twhirl, and you will see the tracked updates with a small "flame" icon in the top right hand corner. Should you not want to see your tracks in twhirl, please disable the "show tracked messages" option on the Network tab.
Note: you may wish to establish an entirely new Gmail account if you wish to use Jabber to perform tracking. The alerts can drive you batty if they come to your normal Gtalk-enabled Gmail account! :-)