[Ubuntu Chicago] Calling at website designers

[Tim Potter]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 6:26 PM, Richard JOHNSON <nixternal at ubuntu.com>wrote:

>
> Of course Identi.ca as well. I hate to say this, but Twitter is way better
> in terms of reaching people, so I tend to sling the word Twitter around
> quite a bit. It is kind of like that silly word Google. I google all the
> time, just with Bing.com. HAHA JUST KIDDING! Hey, I would like to see one
> of these integrated pages you are talking about. That sounds like a good
> idea, and I was thinking of just have a small box with recent tweets/dents.
>
>
So would the focus be around the collection of tweets/dents for listing on
the site ?
If such a solution exists, I could see it being filled with interesting
things if we can define it to list based on certain string combinations such
as ubuntu+chicago, linux+chicago, <insert your favorite code language> +
chicago, or others,   rather than just having one person (or a few people)
post to it.
Of course that would be in addition to the @ messages that go to the server.


Wait, I think I just explained the planet ubuntu, but in a microblog form :)

Searching around, there is an API for both services, and identi.ca is
modeling their API in similar fashion to make things easier[1].

Depending on the choice of the web site and back end, it might be fairly
straight forward to write a php+mysql or any other front end + back end app
that scraped the two services + any additional identi.ca servers a certain
number of times (say twice a day or more depending on the content produced
from the scrapes) to build a nice page.

Here's what looks to be one example of what it could look like[2].

And there is a write up of how to build one on top of django + jQuery [3].
I don't know if that uses twitter dependent API calls, but it looks more
advanced than what I forsee, so maybe it could be slimmed down.

This, I guess, is more of a topic of conversation once the basic framework
of the site is decided.  If your sticking with static HTML+CSS, I could
conceive a bash script to do the data mining and write it to a text file to
be served in a pretty box :)


[1] http://status.net/wiki/TwitterCompatibleAPI?source=laconica
[2] http://www.phpconference.co.uk/aggregator
[3] http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-social-twitter/

-Tim Potter
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