Software etc.

For my Twitter analysis program I need access to quite a lot of data from the twitter api (about 200 requests per visitor). Unfortunately the twitter api has an awful rate limit of 150 requests per hour per IP, so it is impossible to route this all through my server. Fortunately the api accepts jsonp requests, so I decided to offload fetching the data to the client. The problem is that for most of my users 150 requests just won't cut it. After looking up a single person with 150 followers, the user has to wait for an hour. A caching solution is needed. I decided to create a workflow like this for every request that would normally go through the twitter api: Ask my cache at waleson.com for the info. If successful, return. Try the twitter api via json p. If successful, send to waleson.com cache before returning. Ask my server to act as a proxy to the twitter api (Actually I've hooked up some others webservers that I happen to manage that my server uses as proxies). Howe...

Over the last couple of months I've been spending some of my spare time on this project. A web-based interface to twitter analysis. It works thus: Generate a network. (consisting of all followers of @xxxx, @xxxx himself and all followers of @yyyy but not @yyyy himself) Download the data from twitter. (And cache the results to my server, twitter has a horrible 150 requests per hour policy) Let a grouping algorithm put similar people close together (in a web worker, hurray!) Let the user analyse the created network. In the image above I have selected the followers of some of my friends and I am currently checking my influence within their connections. Looks promising, when do you release? Within a week or two. I have some cool stuff that I want to throw in and I need to fix some caching/proxy issues. How did you make this? Javascript, jQuery, web-workers, intelligence (in my brain), and simple html/css

At most busy front offices you have these ticket dispensers, which need no explanation whatsoever: I hate waiting in line. Some weeks ago, I had to wait 45 minutes to get some simple bureaucratic thing done. So it hit me, why not hook up these ticket dispensers to a twitter account! After I get a ticket I can start following the account which simply spews out all numbers that are up. I can do some more shopping, get something to eat, and check twitter to see if my number is about to come up. Seems great right? I'm not entirely sure about the ethics though. It comes close to jumping line, but then again, I see people leave gigantic queues after collecting their ticket to grab a bite to eat. Being able to see which number is on from the screen of your smartphone just makes this leaving less of a gamble.

Drupal is extremely frustrating at times. The organisation of which I manage the Drupal site got on Twitter. We only wanted a a simple block with just our latest posts. I tried three solutions before finding the perfect one: The Twitter module for Drupal Another Drupal module called JUItter ( http://juitter.com/ ) The official Twitter widget Tweet by seaofclouds ( http://tweet.seaofclouds.com/ ) The last was definitely not least, I can tell you that. The Twitter module was terrible , much too complicated for this simple task. Besides there is virtually no documentation . A shame for a module of this size! Furthermore the recommended beta didn't really work. After uninstalling (and removing the created views!) I got a long way with the previous stable version, but it seems that twitter stopped allowing old API calls and now only accepts calls made using OAuth. JUItter seems nice and it is client based (a pro for social media). Above all, it has a ready to use Dru...