Technology and design in plain language.

I often find myself so busy using a tool that I don’t usually have time to talk about how I use it. This seems to be the case with many of the developers in the Movable Type community: lots of awesome things being done, not a lot of time left to share their creations and good ideas.

That got me thinking: how can we give people a clear and up-to-date picture of all the great things happening in the community without burdening community contributors with yet another tool to install or another social network to join?

The answer was simple: Use what they’re already saying. So I design and built (with massive help from Byrne Reese) HashMT to pull in existing conversations from all over Twitter, here in one place.

Here’s how it works: @hashmt follows anyone who is an active contributor to the Movable Type community and displays any tweet they’ve marked with #mt. This makes it easy to contribute since most are twittering already; now their existing conversation can be a part of this community “microblog” just by adding a hash tag to something they were already saying.

Don’t get confused: HashMT isn’t retweeting. Anything you read over by @hashmt is just news about the service. HashMT is simply aggregating specific tweets identified with a hash tag from specified users a particular account is following. You can then read those tweets over at HashMT or subscribe to them via the HashMT RSS feed.