Registered Member
|
Hello
I was curious to see how Konqueror (4.14.2) can be configured for particular use-cases, so I played a while with it and I found a comfortable setup that can be used to follow live streams of public tweets and that I would like to share. Beware, this post is long. TL;DR Use the twitter search page, arrange multiple searches in tabs with split view, use a user-defined stylesheet and you'll get this. Long explanation The use-case requirements that I tried to meet are:
Starting from the first point, the Twitter search page allows registered and non registered users to search for public tweets related to the provided keywords. There are different search options that can be used, and the following URL syntax allows to view the live stream of public tweets of certain users:
For example, if a user would like to read the public tweets of his preferred singers then he has to use a link like this: https://twitter.com/search?q=from:justinbieber OR from:ArianaGrande OR from:taylorswift13&f=tweets. In this way there is no need to use a twitter account to only read some public tweets. Twitter registered users can organize the tweets they read in different streams. For non registered users a solution is to perform different twitter searches. These searches can be grouped in Konqueror using tabs and splitting the views (Window -> Split view). So, for example, in the same window a user can see the tweets of his preferred singers on the left side, and the tweets of his preferred actors on the right side. However, the result is not so nice to look at: Indeed the window is chaotic and full of useless elements. The solution is to hide the unwanted elements and tweak others, using a user defined stylesheet (Settings -> Configure Konqueror -> Appearance). Unfortunately the stylesheet has to be manually written using the CSS syntax, and the correct elements to hide or tweak have to be found inspecting the HTML source of the webpage. Konqueror does not provide modern aiding tools to inspect web pages but, just in case, one can use Firefox with the built-in tool to inspect the elements of a web page or with the Firebug add-on. Here is the example stylesheet I used for the purposes of this post:
It has to be updated each time the webpage is updated in order to target the correct elements. Also, currently (Konqueror 4.14.2) the user defined stylesheet can not be customized per web site, so beware that the rules applied in the stylesheet can affect multiple web sites. Once the stylesheet is applied this is the final result: When the searches are well arranged in tabs this new setup can be saved in a profile (Settings -> Save view profile as...) and it will be immediatly available on request. Lastly, about twitter searches, a nice feature of Konqueror can be exploited, that is web shortcuts (Settings -> Configure Konqueror -> Web shortcuts). A Twitter web shortcut can be set like this:
In this way a user can perform twitter searches directly in the Konqueror URL bar, for example:
Well done, now Konqueror can be used as a twitter reader! To conclude, Konqueror has really nice features since years, some aspects require an improvement but, overall, it is a really versatile software that I hope will be still maintained in the future. I don't know if this post could be useful somehow but I found it fun to play with this configuration and now I do not need a twitter client nor I need a twitter account to follow some tweets. Ciao! |
Registered users: bartoloni, Bing [Bot], Evergrowing, Google [Bot], q.ignora, watchstar