O, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!
So, I’ve just updated my Wordpress plugin to use my own homebrewed URL shortener, http://dpsh.me, when Tweeting about my new blog posts. How exciting!
It was a pretty quick little project to build the shortener a few weeks ago, and updating Wordpress to use it was really easy too. I really should post the code somewhere.
Now, if Tweetie would just hurry up and release an update to the Mac client that includes custom shorteners like the iPhone client does.
I’ve teamed up once again with the illustrious Jamie Rumbelow to make something new, fun and totally nerdy.
We’re currently working on a new podcast called The Fuel Podcast, specifically focused on the CodeIgniter community, but covering a broad array of web development topics that CodeIgniter and non-CodeIgniter developers all will be interested in.
We recorded our first episode last week, and Jamie’s currently working fervently to get our site up and running, so we can open The Fuel Podcast up to the world.
I’ll update when we’ve got something to show for our labors. It’ll certainly be an entertaining experience for all who chose to listen. Our sarcastic, slightly competitive and general nerdy humor will keep you on your toes while you hear us comment on the latest and greatest on the Web.
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.
Just another quick update about Hashtag.it.
I’ve now added the feed of What the Trend into Hashtag.it. Any hashtags that are found on the What the Trend site with a definition will be automatically imported into Hashtag.it.
Hopefully this will help jumpstart usage of the site by prepopulating it with some data.
Also, in the process of adding that functionality, we had a bit of a flub. We lost all the data that was loaded prior to last week. Luckily, it was only about 40 tags.
So, if you had previously added any hashtags to Hashtag.it, please add them again, and continue to add them going forward to help build up a collective database of hashtag definitions.
All for now.
If you aren’t a nerd or don’t know use Twitter, this post may make no sense to you. Fair warning.
A few months ago I quickly built a web site on a whim to store people’s definitions of hashtags from Twitter. The idea came from the huge number of hashtags I see flying by on my Twitter feed everyday. Many are common ones, but many are not. I found myself trying to figure out what they meant, and consequently, I thought maybe it’d be a good idea to try and capture the intent of each hashtag in a database somewhere.
So in a matter of hours I had a fully ajaxified and gracefully-degrading simple site that did just that. It’s called hashtag.it. (And let me tell you, getting a .it domain was a pain.)
It’s been up and running for a few months, and now I’m hoping to focus a little more of my attention to it once again.
Tonight I implemented my first major change to the code.
One of the major problems with launching a site of this nature is that it doesn’t really become useful until it’s full of data, and paradoxically, it doesn’t get full of data until people use it. What to do.. what to do?
Well, just last week Twitter updated their homepage, and as I diddled around with it I noticed that the trending hashtags listed on their homepage had definitions, which I later found out were sourced by a site called What the Trend. My heart sunk at first, thinking that maybe I’d missed the boat again in getting a cool site out the door and on the road to success. I looked around the site a little. It’s basically a site, somewhat similar to hashtag.it, except it deals exclusively with Twitter trends, be they hashtags or not.
Upon doing a little more digging, I found the What the Trend API. DING DING DING! I contacted the developer and found him amenable to my idea for using his API, which is great.
So now, all hashtags that appear on What the Trend will be directly imported into hashtag.it.
I’m hoping that over the next few days and weeks a large backlog of data can be stored and hashtag.it can actually become a useful resource for Twitter users.
That all sounds pretty nerdy, I’m sure. But I’m excited about it, and you should be too.
If you’re a Twitter user, please log onto hashtag.it and help me out by adding any hashtags you use in your Tweets. Also follow @hashtagit on Twitter to get the latest updates to the site. By adding tags, you’ll get yourself a little publicity too, as each definition links back to the URL you provide.
