Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
So Twitter stores and returns timezones in a relatively non-standard format. Well, non-standard from what PHP (and most languages) can understand. IANA is a fairly universal format and includes 548 zones, covering most, if not all, regional and political handling of UTC offsets and daylight saving…
When I built the pushup Twitter bot a while back there was at least one gaping feature that I skipped over: timezones. The application has a timezone, which makes sense from a tracking and reporting standpoint, but there was no detection of user timezones. If a user wanted to be reminded to do an…
After playing with Twitter's streaming API this year I started to think of all the cool possibilities out there. If you could depend on a bot for a real-time response to any query… Well, there's a lot you could do. Targeted results, calculations, even two-way interactions, all from the…
Over the last few months I've been having a lot of fun with the Twitters. It all started simply enough, just upgrading my lifestream to pull from an authenticated feed. Now I'm playing with a few Twitter bots, looking into the streaming API, and even working on a PHP library with David Kryzaniak.…
The most difficult part of pulling information from Twitter's 1.1 API is the actual request. I've covered how to create the OAuth request in some previous posts: making a basic OAuth request and passing in extra parameters. Once you get the information back, though, what do you do with it?
Twitter…
A while ago I wrote a post explaining how to pull data from Twitter's API. I focused on pulling the default authenticated user timeline (which, if you set up the application under your account, you are the authenticated user). Wouldn't it be great if you could customize the request a bit?
The…
There is a big difference between human-readable dates and computer-parseable date information. People are much better interpreters of variable inputs while most programs pass around a standardized machine format. Since I'm a PHP guy the two formats I'm used to are MySQL DATETIME and the UNIX…
Twitter has been slowly changing up their API over the last few months. When I first set up a cron to pull my Twitter timeline over a year ago I was able to pull a public RSS feed without too much difficulty. If they were over capacity, either just on the API side or with the entire application, my…
Thanks to the prevalence of microblogging, and before that the infamous 80 column screen, friendly (or keyword-stuffed) URLs have run into character limit issues. Long URLs are great for both SEO and usability. They give both users and search bots an insight on the page's content before actually…
With the advent of Google Plus a few weeks ago, I've found it interesting to compare the differences of the major 'social networks' out there in today's internet. There's been a lot of discussion out there on Facebook versus Google, but I don't think it's fair to compare only these two applications.…