checking twitter mentions using firefox and nothing else
Although I don't use Twitter much (but maybe I'll get back in the game with it later), I do use it enough to where I care about to track if I have any @replies. However I can't stand Twitter clients. The last I used was Echofon in Firefox. Very good app, but it slowed my browser down on startup, plus it would periodically disconnect for no reason. I don't know if that's echofon's or Twitter's fault, nor do I care.
I found the best way to track @replies using Firefox and nothing else is to subscribe to a Twitter search RSS feed and place it in a toolbar for easy access.
How it's done:
1. Go to Twitter advanced search
2. Next to the People category, put your Twitter username in there both in To and Reference, like this:
3. Click the Search button. On the next page whether any results show up or not, hit the orange RSS icon in the address bar:
4. Subscribe to the feed using Live Bookmarks:
5. Place the feed in your Bookmarks Toolbar (you might want to change the name to something more friendly). If you have the bookmarks toolbar disabled, you'll need to re-enable it via View / Toolbars / Bookmarks Toolbar.
6. Your @reply button is ready to use in the toolbar:
I renamed mine just so it wouldn't take up so much room. For the ultimate in tidiness, you could rename it to the single character @, like this:
You wanted tidy? That's tidy. 🙂
Whenever you click the bookmark, a menu will drop down showing any Twitter @reply sent to you specifically.
This is especially useful when (yes, when) your Twitter client screws up/times out/whatever because to the best of my knowledge the feed always works.
Clicking any @reply in the feed will take you directly there. If logged into Twitter via the site, the resulting page will have reply/retweet/favorite links:
The favorite link by the way is the star.
As far as drawbacks with this method, I can only think of one. You're not notified of any new @replies when they occur, so you will have to manually check the feed. Other than that this is a very good client-less solution.
