
Javascript hack weekend: Unique projects to inspire awesome hacks - ericz
http://blog.nowjs.com/weekends-are-for-hacking-heres-some-un-cruddy
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geuis
This is a project I wrote the weekend of the Japan earthquake.
<http://tensecondstotokyo.com/>

I wanted to see what was happening in Japan live from the people who live
there.

I used node and socket.io to provide a realtime view of photos posted to
Twitpic on Twitter. The server stores the last 100 photos found, so that's the
max that are ever seen. Just a stream of photos.

Other than a few friends at work and some folks at a node.js talk I gave a few
weeks ago, no one else has seen this. Well, I did show it to Mikey from
Instagram when I ran into him at a coffee shop.

I'm also working on integrating Instagram's photos too, but haven't finished
that yet.

Couple of notes:

1) There's never been more than a handful of people accessing the site at a
time, so I have no idea how well it will scale. There's almost no load, so I
suspect it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

2) My url parsing regex fu needs some work. If you watch the stream with dev
tools enabled, you'll see a number of 404s from Twitpic where non-existent
photos are being accessed. Don't worry, these don't show up visually on the
site though.

Would love people's feedback, suggestions, and complaints. Especially from
design-type folks. I'd like to give it a better look.

Conact info: @geuis or geuis.teses@gmail.com

~~~
auxbuss
Is this for the whole of Japan or Tokyo only?

~~~
geuis
Whole of the country. Its geo centered on the Imperial palace in Tokyo though,
but the range includes all of the country.

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alexkearns
I don't know if this counts as a hack (certainly it took a lot longer than a
weekend) but here's my web-based timeline software done mainly in JS:
<http://www.tiki-toki.com>

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olegp
If you don't need the real time element that NodeJS/NowJS offers, may I
suggest you give <http://www.akshell.com> a go. Real time features are in the
works, but aren't currently publicly available.

We're really keen to see people experiment with server side JavaScript on the
platform and will instantly answer any queries you may have on our mailing
list at <http://groups.google.com/group/akshell>

~~~
faceplant
What do you mean by "if you don't need the real-time element"?

~~~
olegp
I mean that if you're building a typical web app that uses the
request/response cycle rather than requiring real time push from the server
using Comet or WebSockets, Akshell, with it's synchronous I/O, should be
easier to work with.

~~~
faceplant
Oh, I see. So it works as normal it just doesn't have server push yet. Gotcha.

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pokoleo
Made a project last weekend using the raphael.js + the Facebook API.

<http://shalecraig.com/friendspore>

Since it's all local (no node + etc), your data stays with you.

------
lux
Similar to Popcorn.js but more for visual effects:

<http://www.cacophonyjs.com/>

(self plug :)

