

Show and Tell YC: Built a webapp in ~14 hours - aupajo
http://tweetsnap.com/

======
aupajo
Woke up on Friday morning (read: lunchtime) after a to-4am code-a-thon with a
startup project I'm working on, refreshed and ready to take a well-deservered
early weekend of rest and relaxation.

:) Right.

Needless to say, the first thought I had when I woke up was "wouldn't it be
cool if..." and the rest, as they say, is two days of pure hackery. I give you
the end result: TweetSnap.

It's a really simple premise: enter your Twitter username, get an image back
which you can put on your site to show your latest tweet.

It's designed for people who uses websites/etc which don't allow the typical
"insert javascript snippet for AJAXy awesomeness" but does allow you to
hotlink images (great example: forum signatures).

I haven't looked to see if anyone else has done this yet, mainly because I
just did this for fun and I don't really care :) But try it out, give me your
feedback. Temperamental results to be expected while on shared hosting :)

For the techies:

\- Rails 2.1 w/ a minimalist MySQL DB

\- Image generation done with RMagick 2.5

\- XML parsing with Hpricot

\- Message parsing a combo of htmlentities and a custom lib (supports
characters like ø™¡)

~~~
vulpes
Very very cool, what did you program in? Have you had any previous experience
with Twitter API/RSS feeds? Reason being if you are pretty versed in rss feed
pulling/image generation the backend is done pretty quickly, as most of it is
just knowing how to do it. I'd imagine you spent more time on making it look
pretty. Does it automatically filter out replies and such?

~~~
aupajo
Rails 2.1. No previous experience with the Twitter API, but I'm used to
building RESTfully designed applications (which Twitter is). I chose to pull
the XML version of your timeline as opposed to the RSS version, because the
information is purer.

First day was getting it to work, second day was design. Replies aren't
filtered (although I'd like to do that at some point, for the moment I'm happy
to keep it simple).

Biggest effort went into RMagick, which was incredibly frustrating. On the
second day I rewrote the majority of the stuff I wrote on the first day so
that it was better organised and less of a mess.

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ivankirigin
The link you generate shoots back tweetsnap. People might want it to point to
their twitter stream. This is an interesting tradeoff between what people
would want and what will make this spread.

I think the solution is to make the tweetsnap link have a link to the user's
twitter stream. For example:

    
    
      <a href="http://tweetsnap/twitter/tipjoy">
      <img alt="Tipjoy" src="http://tweetsnap.com/twitter/show/tipjoy.png" />
      </a>
    

The href leads to a page that shows the same form to make your own tweetsnap
widget, but the page could have a side bar that grabs the last few tweets from
@tipjoy and a link to <http://twitter.com/tipjoy>

~~~
aupajo
Edit: Now made.

~~~
ivankirigin
Hmm. That is nice, but I would put back the form to make your own. Make the
link to the twitter user's stream an afterthought. Probably not that big of a
deal either way.

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babul
I love the Show and Tell idea, we should have more of them!

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froo
Further expanding on what you've done there, what about doing "mood avatars"
based off tweets? Essentially a mashup of Twistori/Tweetsnap?

What I'm thinking basically is, people can upload their normal avatars to your
site, which you use as the backdrop for your image.. and based off emotions
that they tweet (love, hate etc) it can overlay a translucent colour on it?

So in effect, changing the mood of someone's avatar, based off their Tweets?

Just a thought :)

~~~
aupajo
Yeah, I thought about letting people upload their own backdrops, or providing
more than one. But I'm keeping it simple for now; it's much easier to add a
feature than to remove it later.

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thorax
This is a cool idea.

We had our fun with image hackery with featurelist. A lot of users discuss
things on forums, etc, where they can't post javascript/flash, so we created
little banners like this so users can get other people to vote for their
feature requests:

<http://featurelist.org/widgets/feature_badge/513/banner.png>

~~~
aupajo
Nice! What technologies did you use?

~~~
thorax
Pretty much just relying on the PHP/GD image manipulation functions and some
TrueType fonts.

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jfornear
This is the most impressive app I've seen in weeks. Very cool.

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crescendo
The design is beautifully minimalist. I love it!

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auston
Once again... Perfect opportunity for TIPJOY!

~~~
aupajo
Added, it'll appear soon.

~~~
ivankirigin
Nice widget! You're featured on Tipjoy :) <http://tipjoy.com/featured>

Make a slightly narrower version, and I'll put tweetsnap in my sidebar here:
<http://tipjoys2cents.blogspot.com/>

~~~
aupajo
I've got a list of features I'm toying with. You'll likely see this in the
next week.

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PStamatiou
nice work. not sure where but something like this was around when people
thought Virb was cool and people needed images of their tweets as it didnt
allow JS etc

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Andi
Twitter, tweitter, twitter. Is there nothing else?

------
aupajo
By the way, if anyone's curious, my Twitter name is Aupajo.

