flex your info

The ALA 2009 event tracker is now available!  You can view the most recent photos and tweets tagged with ala2009, or any of the other official conference hash tags.  Check out my previous post to learn more about the idea behind the event tracker.

Since we last left the event tracker, there have been a number of changes to the application.  I was on vacation for more than a week since then (due to the work shutdown last week), time spent mostly on a train without Internet access, so not as many things were added as I planned.  However, I’m still pleased with how it has turned out in the time I’ve had available! The biggest difference is the ability to view and search for tweets with hash tags other than the main conference hash tag.

Here’s what has been added:

• pagination of tweets
• archiving and showing hash tags other than the main conference hash tag; use the “select tag” button to choose which ones you’re interested in
• saving twitter profile pics (before we saved a link which, if you changed your profile pic, would then be a broken image)
• ability to add links to cognotes when they become available online
• lots of other, behind-the-scenes stuff like restructuring the database and how tweets are stored, making the hash tags and day information external XML files so they can be updated without having to upload a new app, error handling
• author relaxation, through more than a week of vacation (main reason why I didn’t get more done!)

What I’d still like to add (maybe for midwinter?):

• ability to narrow tweets by time period, allowing tweets to be mapped to a particular event time
• ability to show event information; this requires event information in XML (or some other standard) format, which hopefully ALA can provide in the future
• additional information such as blog posts and delicious links; need to figure out how to fit this into the UI (should we reduce space for photos/tweets, or just add a “see more” button that displays the additional info?)
• ability to export information

I’ll try to put together a post about some of the challenges that I faced while working on this, but just to refresh my memory later, here’s a quick list:

• GMT time (tweets of the future!)
• updating based on old database model
• cron jobs to load web pages (went with Web Service Scheduler)
• trying to avoid hitting API limits (both flickr and twitter)

Overall it’s been fun to work on this, and I hope that it will be useful for those attending the conference, those who can’t make it, and those who later want to reflect on what happened.