If you’ve not heard of TwitterKeys, it’s a great way to insert all sorts of symbols into your Twitter tweets. Emoticons, warning symbols, religious symbols, and more are a part of the palette of characters available to you via TwitterKeys.
The way TwitterKeys works is that you drag a JavaScript bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmark toolbar. Pressing it pops open a small window giving you access to all sorts of character symbols that you won’t find on keyboards, some of which you may not have even known were available to you.
The site markets TwitterKeys as a way to enhance your tweets on Twitter, and as a way to squeeze more content into Twitter’s 140 character limit. “I love TwitterKeys” is longer than “I ♥ TwitterKeys,” so using the latter is going to let you pump even more content into the Twittersphere.
I’m finding it useful for plenty of other things, though — the symbols work just as well in many message boards, blog posts, instant messaging, word processing documents, and more.
As such, I had that little popup window open fairly frequently. I don’t like extra windows, though, especially small ones that disappear behind so many larger windows that I may have open.
Then I remembered a neat little feature in Firefox: Any bookmark can be set to open in a sidebar. Out of curiosity, then, I right-clicked on the TwitterKeys bookmarklet and pulled up its properties.
I changed the location of the bookmark to simply http://thenextweb.org/TwitterKeys/keys.php and selected the box to open the link in a sidebar.
Now, instead of a popup browser window, I can use TwitterKeys in a nice looking sidebar in my browser. It doesn’t get lost underneath windows anymore, and it’s just that much easier to access all sorts of symbols that I may need.
I’d love to hear if this is possible in other browsers; in Firefox 3 on the Mac… Works like a treat!
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Nice! Strangely though I’m not seeing character entities properly on my Firefox. I think something funky must be going on with fonts or something. Don’t even see the little arrows on my blog :(
Is your character encoding (View menu) set to Unicode?
Yup.
Hmm, now that is strange. Do the symbols not show up in the TwitterKeys box only, or are they failing to show up in Twitter as well?
Some of them show up, but the ones that don’t show don’t show anywhere. E.g. I can’t see the heart you have in the post above, there’s just a blank space and it was the same in Google Reader… I can see them in twhirl though and probably Adium, so it’s not my whole system, just FF.
Well now that is danged peculiar. Is this on Mac or Windows? (Not that I know how to solve it on either system… More or less curious. :D )
Mac (Tiger)
I have the same problem as kristarella — I cannot see the heart symbol, and I guess if you used some arrows, then I can’t see those either. Prior to now, I had thought this was the case on all Macs…
However, based on this info, I’m led to believe that it’s simply a software difference between Rick’s computer and ours… Kristarella, are you running Firefox 3? I’m still running deux on my primary machine, and I honestly haven’t checked out Firefox 3 in any kind of detail on the Mac. Could be as simple as FF2 vs. FF3, ya know?
Nah, I’m using FF3. I don’t know if it was happening on FF2, I was using Camino when I had FF2 installed and only used it for debugging. I’m still on Tiger though, maybe it’s that?
I’m running Leopard, and still nada. It’s gotta boil down to installed software… I wonder what the culprit is.
Weird. If you’re really curious I have a software list, not all of them are still installed, but most are. Maybe it’s a FF plugin?
I’ve got Delicious, Google Gears, StumbleUpon, Web Developer (and Firebug of course, but Rick has that too).
Commenting from my phone, but what if it’s a simple settings difference in Mac OS X? Dunno what it could be, though.
That is quite interesting, I have been using Twitter a lot lately and had never thought to implement symbols. I’ll have to give it a try ;)
So many people use Twhirl to tweet and not all of these symbols show up on Twhirl.
That’s odd jamee. I used to use twhirl and the symbols did show up there, even if they didn’t show up in Firefox.
Kristarella…
I haven’t tried them all..I know I’ve tried the heart and the sun from the regular character map and they work. When I found twitterkeys I tried one of the flowers directly into twhirl and it did not work, so I did it through twitter like the directions say and it worked on twitter but when my post showed up on twhirl they were empty boxes rather then flowers.
I can’t say I’ve tried them all either. I think it’s some weird font thing. Some people can probably see your characters.
You might be right..I did read somewhere today…a person commenting that you had to change the font choice in the options for twhirl to see them all. But it didn’t way which font to choose ..and then the whole point is for others to see it..and they aren’t necessarily gonna go and change from the default twhirl font.