Hashtags, Client-Server jQuery using AJAX and a Tight Deadline

Well, doesn’t that sound quite weird?

If you follow my Tweets at all, you’ve probably read that in late November, I’ll be traveling to the U.K. to join the illustrious Jamie Rumbelow, prince of PHP, at his first Cambridge Geek Day conference.

You may also know, that I’ve built a basic prototype of an application called hashtag.it, which seeks to become a single source for meta information about hashtags used on Twitter.

One thing I’ve noticed at conferences is that session or conference hashtags are not standardized. Well, duh. That’s the beauty of the hashtag, it’s a completely community-driven piece of meta data. That’s all fine and good, but with the growing number of Twitter users, relevance is being lost. The goal of hashtag.it is to increase the relevance of Tweets to users by publicizing information about hashtags that users are using.

In a bit of a publicity stunt, I’ve offered to build an application for Cambridge Geek Day that helps attendees to use hashtags to make their Tweets during the conference more useful to other attendees and others interested in the event.

So, I’m building Cambridge Geek Day Connect. Basically, it’s an application that maintains a small cache of Tweets that contain specific hashtags that can be configured on the fly.

On the client side, jQuery is used to poll the caching server. As I’ve begun to build out the application, I’ve had to wonder what will happen with approximately 300 attendees fire up Connect, and requests begin to hit my server at a rapid clip. Will it crash? I hope not. At the same time, I wondered, what if a new hashtag comes into use after the event starts, and I want to make sure all the conference attendees have access to it?

The result, is a bit of a client-server setup. It’s nothing monumental, really. Configuration information is simply passed as part of each of the API’s response to the client. Configuration changes can be made to speed up or slow down the refresh of data from the client or update the hashtag filter options in the clients menu.

I’m sure it’s been done before. But I still must say, it’s pretty cool to see these configuration changes take place, being pushed out from the server to the clients.