I don’t really know what the huge deal with twitter is. I have had an account for a while now and don’t use it much. Today I got bored and took a small look at there API and came up with a little thing to grab the last tweet I made on there. You will see it up at the top right of the page.

To keep the page load time down I implemented a “javascript” way to do grab the last one. The page you are looking loads with all the content. Down at the bottom just before the </body> tag there is a div and inside it I load a PHP with javascript. That PHP file grabs the last post from Twitter and shows it. Thus, the only content not rendered right  away when waiting for Twitter is the last tweet.

=)

Not sure how much I will use it, but it was fun.

Having done ecommerce work myself I have been somewhat following this issue. For those not familiar with it here is whats going down. In New York they are working on forcing e-commerce sites that have affiliates in New York to charge sales tax to all New York residents. Doesn’t sound bad right? Well lets break it down using Amazon as its the biggest.

Amazon does NOT have a business in New York meaning right now they do not charge sales tax to customers in New York. What they do have is affiliates that exist in New York though. So the NY government wants to charge tax since the affiliates are in their states. Thats like saying Sitepoint.com would have to charge sales tax in Michigan because I have an affiliate account with them. Its not even if they go through the affiliate in state, its across the entire catalog regardless if someone used an affiliate or not. To me it makes no sense.

I have an idea in mind for Amazon however at a business aspect its bad, but on a “stick it to the man” aspect it fits. Since I do not sell products online I say this with ease but am still undetermined if I were to have a business selling online. I would boycott sales to the state of NY, and draw up a big controversy over it so the people of NY would get upset and call their elected officials. Hopefully getting them to realize its a bad idea. However in reality it won’t happen.

Amazon has been trying to stop this from happening by suing saying that they were specifically targeted with this tax. When it first came up they were claiming that it was being called the Amazon Tax (I am not clever enough to make that up) by officials meaning it was targeting Amazon.com for this. A judge has recently shut Amazon down with this case. ArsTechnica Link