toss140.net – about the site

Twitter about any story,
link to it, use #toss140.

We will find your summary
and put it here.

What is this?

toss140.net is a crowdsourced summary of newspaper columnists, so you can be on top of the pundits, and decide if you want to read them.

How do I write a summary?

Just twitter your summary, and include a link to the piece you're summarising (shortened is fine, we are very clever). As long as you include the hashtag #toss140, we will find your tweet and the website will do the rest, deducing the author name, the newspaper title, the date, etc.

How can I keep track of new summaries?

I posted a summary, but it hasn't shown up?

There's a short delay (about 5 minutes) before new posts appear on the site. If you didn't link to the article you're summarising, then your post won't appear on the main site. You can look here to see all the posts we couldn't find links for. (Of course if your post was blatant spam, then we've probably deleted it.)

My summary appears in the “Recently posted” box, but I can't find it anywhere else?

To capture the author and date, we automatically examine the web page that you linked to. This has to be done differently for each site, because different sites format the author, date and so forth in different ways. At the moment it only works for a handful of sites (the major UK newspapers, principally). We're adding new ones all the time though, so try checking back in a few days.

Is the code available?

Of course. It's here, on GitHub. If you want to contribute, please get in touch.

Anything else?

If you have any other questions, or comments, write to us at contact@toss140.net.

How do I write a summary?

Just twitter your summary, and include a link to the piece you're summarising (shortened is fine, we are very clever). As long as you include the hashtag #toss140, we will find your tweet and the web site will do the rest, deducing the author name, the newspaper title, the date, etc.