The Daily Chengyu Tweet!

[chrix]

So I took the 1,424 chengyu from the frequent chengyu list and made a daily chengyu tweet out of it. It will provide a chengyu a day, with an explanation in English.

phyrex was so kind as to help me with setting up a script, the script will go live in 3 days, and if everything works out, it should run for almost four years.

Comments are most welcome. Post them here, or on twitter

[wushijiao]

Great idea!

[buanryoh]

Any chance you could post them on here as well? Just for those who cannot access Twitter from behind the great firewall.

[in_lab]

buanryoh, I can't access twitter here either, but I subscribed to the feed in google reader, so maybe you could try that or some other RSS reader. Would that work, or would it get firewalled?

Some of the messages get cut off, but most of them were readable.

[chrix]

if there's a way to automatise it here on the forums, sure. I could even re-make the master list in a different format. But the main point is there has to be a way to do this automatically, I wouldn't wanna enter 1,424 chengyu by hand

[roddy]

We could automate it on here (we can automate anything with an RSS feed, which Twitter certainly will) but I'm not 100% sure we want to do that if it's just going to be post after post with no discussion. Not ruling it out though.

Another option if Fanfou, basically a Chinese version of Twitter. Last I looked there weren't any easy tools to feed an RSS feed into Fanfou like there are with Twitter, but it does have an API so shouldn't be too hard to do.

[chrix]

Is it back yet? It looks like fanfou was blocked like twitter was, maybe even worse, since the website right now appears to be down...

EDIT: The Shanghaiist just posted about this issue today

[roddy]

Oh, didn't realize Fanfou had issues. There were other similar sites, not sure if any are still available.

[chrix]

Quote Shanghaiist:

If there's one thing that we at Shanghaiist would like to thank the Net Nanny for, it's that she's totally reunited Chinese microbloggers with the one big happy family that is Twitter again. You see, previously, everyone was distributed across a plethora of local microblogging services, but now with the demise of the two kingpins of the Chinese twitter clone world, Fanfou and Jiwai, everyone's just decided to collectively show the GFW their middle finger by signing up for a damn VPN and rejoining the conversation on Twitter.

Looks like the best best would be to get a VPN... OR to post them here, hehe but I agree, I'm not sure what format would be best if they were to be posted here. If any entries generate any kind of discussion, it would be better to have the conversation on one platform, in this case twitter...

EDIT: though if anyone wants to leave comments regarding the contents of the chengyu tweets here (like typo corrections, or questions about usage etc), I'll be happy to retweet the comments on twitter if they can't access twitter themselves...

[buanryoh]

Could we do something similar to what they do on www.iciba.com with the 每日一词，每日一句，每日一译 posts? I would be more than happy to contribute on a daily basis. I especially like the 每日一译, and I'm sure many people would find it extremely useful as a reference and to track their own progess.

Thanks,

Marc

[chrix]

Sorry, somehow the tweet stopped on January 31st. I'm sorry not about checking in at twitter earlier. We're on it, but if this should happen again, you can also notify us by posting on this thread, or messaging the account on twitter.