Prologue Theme Mod with 140 Chars Limit

Note: You are reading about an older version of the theme mod. The most updated post is here. Thank you.

Update: Okay, I was being a total fool for thinking that Twitter’s limit is 128 instead of 140. Thanks to Jeffro2pt0 for reminding me, and I have reuploaded the theme to reflect the changes. End of update.

Prologue is the new, wonderful theme by Automattic. What’s great about this theme is that it’s not your average blog-looking theme. Here’s what they have to say:

So last week Joseph Scott and Matt Thomas decided to tackle this problem and within a few days they had a new theme for us: Prologue. Imagine it like a group Twitter.

Yes, it is a Twitter-like theme, complete with textarea at the top of the page for logged-in authors to submit their post immediately, Twitter-style. They have set up a demo as well.

All in all, it’s a great, well-executed idea. And as a tribute to its greatness, I’d love to contribute my own addition: make it so that you can only post 140 chars per post. Because there’s something Zen-like about it. Because constraints drive innovation and force focus. Because you’re addicted to Twitter enough that writing longer than 140 characters grinds your brain to a halt.

Whatever the reason, this might just be the mod for you.

Terri Ann to the Rescue

Being the lazy guy that I am, the first thing I do is of course look around the net for scripts to do the functionality. And Terri Ann just so happen to create the very functionality a week ago. There are actually quite a lot of such scripts, but I liked Terry’s for its ease of use and simplicity. Plus, it uses Prototype JS, which is already included in everyone’s installation of WordPress. Nice!

And after fooling around for a bit, I finally made it!

Here you go, download Prologue Theme Mod, now with 140 chars limit!

Final Note

I didn’t create the Prologue Theme, Joseph Scott and Matt Thomas from Automattic did. I didn’t create the character-limiting JS functionality as well, it was made by Terri Ann. All credits should go to them. I didn’t do much but combine the two things together.

Also, since the limiter is done by Javascript, you will be able to bypass the chars limit if you turn it off. But hey, it’s your own blog, so I don’t think that would be too big of a problem

Thanks, and hope you like it! (Please don’t bother them if there’s bug with the mod, let me know instead.)

Miscellanea

Here’s a great topic regarding the design of limited characters input.