Wynn Netherland

Ten things we learned building TweetCongress.org

2010-03-30T08:11:18-05:00

I had such a fun time at the OKCCoco at OpenBeta4. Adam and I met a lot of super bright folks building some really cool apps. Here's the video and slides from my keynote.

Twitter gem hits 0.9.0

2010-03-20T10:35:06-05:00

I don't normally do a post for new releases, but if you're using the Twitter gem, there are some new changes you might want to test before deploying.

New endpoint

The biggest change is the gem now fully supports the new Twitter versioned endpoint api.twitter.com/ thanks to Erik Michaels-Ober. Some methods have already been using the new endpoint but we've been waiting for Twitter to fully support (read OAuth) on this URL. What's this mean to you? Maybe not much unless you have to punch through a firewall to hit the Twitter API. Regardless, if your app uses OAuth to authenticate with Twitter, it's a good idea to put the new gem thru the paces before you deploy.

Search exclusions

Thanks to a patch from Adam Bozanich, search now includes exclusions:

# get all references to harmony app not from jnunemaker or to pengwynn
Twitter::Search.new('harmony app').from('jnunemaker', true).to('pengwynn', true).fetch

We've also enhanced search to support the upcoming popular query:

# default result type is mixed
Twitter::Search.new('whodat').fetch
# get most popular tweets about the Saints
Twitter::Search.new('whodat').result_type('popular').fetch
# get most recent tweets about the Saints
Twitter::Search.new('whodat').result_type('recent').fetch

Tweet and ReTweet sat on a log. Tweet jumps off. Who's left?

We also added support for two newly released API methods: retweeted_by and retweeted_by_ids:

# create an authenticated client
base = Twitter::Base.new(Twitter::HTTPAuth.new('username', 'password'))
# get the users who retweeted a tweet
base.retweeters_of(10579279780)
# get just the user ids
base.retweeters_of(10579279780, :ids_only => true)

That's it for now. Enjoy!

Enhance your site search with OpenSearch

2010-02-15T15:54:30-06:00

If your web site provides its own search function, set up OpenSearch to let your users search from the browser search box.

With two simple steps you can let users hit your site's search page without forcing them to visit first.

First, create an OpenSearch definition.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
                       xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>Wynn Netherland</ShortName>
<Description>Designer &amp; Developer</Description>
<Contact>wynn@orrka.com</Contact>
<Image height="16" width="16" type="image/x-icon">http://wynnnetherland.com/favicon.ico</Image>
<Url type="text/html" method="get" template="http://wynnnetherland.com/?s={searchTerms}"/>
<moz:SearchForm>http://wynnnetherland.com</moz:SearchForm>
</OpenSearchDescription>

Next, reference your search definition in your page layout.

<link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="http://wynnnetherland.com/opensearch.xml" title="Wynn Netherland" />

Here's a quick video on how FireFox and Chrome handle OpenSearch and how your users will benefit:

CSS Metaframeworks - King of all @media

2010-02-10T13:43:47-06:00

I had the opportunity to give a presentation on CSS Metaframeworks at Dallas.rb last week. We discussed CSS, Sass, Compass, LessCSS, xCSS, Blueprint, and 960.gs. Here are the video and slides.

Sneak peek: tail -f thechangelog

2010-01-21T11:37:12-06:00

I wanted to give you my readers (all five of you) a sneak peek at a little something Adam and I have been working on over at The Changelog.

Introducing tail.thechangelog.com

Adam and I are always looking for ways to discover what's fresh and new in open source so we built a little application that helps you drink from the GitHub firehose. Tail gives you a real-time view of all public GithHub events and lets you filter by event type and programming languages. It still has some rough spots but we'd love to get your feed back here or just send a tweet to @changelogshow.

Visit: http://tail.thechangelog.com

Quick tip: Use APIdock to hunt down missing methods

2009-12-22T15:40:57-06:00

From time to time, we all to have step into older projects and add features. Suddenly that old standby method you'd come to love is giving you a method_missing. How do you go about finding out which version of Rails introduced it so you can upgrade or monkey patch? APIdock has your back. I bring this up because all too many gems depend on Active Support from Rails and introducing a new gem into an older Rails project can lead to some headaches when Active Support versions collide.

A real world example

My LinkedIn gem depends on ROXML which in turn depends on Active Support, and more specifically Object#present?. If you don't know present? is just the opposite of blank?. Never one to eschew the unless conditional (I know, I'm a heretic) I've always used unless foo.blank? and didn't notice when present? was added.

So when asked to debug my gem in an older project the error message was puzzling: undefined method `present?' for "status":String

String in this case is just a red herring. How do I know that? (Pretend for a minute you don't use present? all the time or that you're a noob). A quick search on APIdock tells us that Active Support added this method in version 2.2.1.

I know this because the navigation is enabled for this method starting in 2.2.1. So, mystery solved. My friend can now monkey patch his way out of this one or upgrade to a later version of Active Support. Pick your poison.

The Twitter gem now supports Tumblr

2009-12-18T16:09:32-06:00

On the heels of the announcement that Tumblr now supports the Twitter API, we're happy to say the Twitter gem now supports Tumblr!

Be sure and grab 0.8.0:

sudo gem install twitter

To use the gem with Tumblr, pass a new argument when using HTTPAuth. Also note your username is your email address on Tumblr:

httpauth = Twitter::HTTPAuth.new('email', 'password', :api_endpoint => 'tumblr.com')
base = Twitter::Base.new(httpauth)

pp base.user_timeline

Tumblr does not support all API methods and instead returns 404s. I'll look into a way to catch those and raise NotImplemented instead.

Use JavaScript to put GitHub info on your site

2009-12-15T10:24:57-06:00

In case you missed it, Adam and I launched a new blog and are six episodes into a new podcast where we bring you what's fresh and new in open source software. Our goal is to scour the depths of GitHub (and other sources) to highlight the cool new and newly released open source projects. As the good folks at Github recently highlighted, one of my favorite features of the blog is the GitHub integration. Here's how to use JavaScript to put GitHub info on your site. For The Changelog, when we link to a GitHub repo, we wanted to display the number of times the repo has been forked or watched:

To do this, we call Version 2 of the GitHub API, which provides a great deal of info about GitHub users and repositories. To retrieve repo info, we call repos/show method:

http://github.com/api/v2/xml/repos/show/pengwynn/linkedin

The API supports JSON, YAML, and XML return types. From JavaScript, JSON is the simplest data format to work with. Simply replace the xml segment with json:

http://github.com/api/v2/json/repos/show/pengwynn/linkedin

Most likely, hitting this URL from your browser will download the file. Open that up in your favorite text editor and you should see a JavaScript Object Notation representation of the same repo info:

{
    "repository": {
        "url": "http://github.com/pengwynn/linkedin",
        "description": "Ruby wrapper for the LinkedIn API",
        "watchers": 43,
        "homepage": "http://bit.ly/ruby-linkedin",
        "fork": false,
        "forks": 1,
        "private": false,
        "name": "linkedin",
        "owner": "pengwynn",
        "open_issues": 1
    }
}

To put this info on the page, in our example, we'll use jQuery, but you can of course use another framework or plain vanilla JavaScript.

jQuery(document).ready(function($){

  $.each($('.post.link.github h3 a'), function() {
    var post = $(this).parents(".post");
    var url = $(this).attr('href');
    var segments = url.split('/');
    var repo = segments.pop();
    var username = segments.pop();
    $.getJSON("http://github.com/api/v2/json/repos/show/"+username+"/"+repo+"?callback=?", function(data){
      var repo_data = data.repository;
      if(repo_data) {
        var watchers_link = $('<a>').addClass('watchers').attr('href', url+'/watchers').text(repo_data.watchers);
        var forks_link = $('<a>').addClass('forks').attr('href', url+'/network').text(repo_data.forks);
        var comment_link = post.find('.meta .comment-count');
        comment_link.after(watchers_link);
        comment_link.after(forks_link);
      }
    });
  });
});

This code looks for any entries that have CSS classes of link and github (which come from the post's tags), and find the href for the link. We then lop off the last two URL segments to get the repo name and user to pass to our API call.

Note the callback=? which is required for the dynamic JSONP callback which jQuery wires up to our inline callback function. In this function, the data parameter is that JSON we looked at earlier. In this case we just create a couple of links that point back to GitHub and append them to the .meta div for the post.

Easy peasy!

Speed up your API development, sniff your network calls on OSX with HTTPScoop

2009-12-07T15:26:39-06:00

HTTPScoop from Tuffcode is a neat way to see what network calls are going on from all the applications in OS X. It's perfect for debugging API calls or creating fixtures for API wrapper tests.

Download the free trial. Full version is only $15 + tax.

Add a retweet button to your Rails app easily with the Backtweets helper

2009-12-02T13:09:05-06:00

On this blog, I use the excellent Socialize plugin to easily add social sharing buttons to each post. For Twitter, I chose to configure Socialize to use Backtweets for displaying tweet counts mainly because it's more configurable than the TweetMeme widget.

When I needed a Backtweets widget for a client Rails application, I whipped up a quick plugin that provides an easy helper for writing all those JavaScript options.

Installation

You can install the plugin from the GitHub repo:

script/plugin install git://github.com/pengwynn/backtweets_helper.git

Displaying a tweet count in your view

To display a count of tweets that reference the current page, simply call the helper:

<%= backtweets_count %>
<%= backtweets_count(:size => :small) %>

The full set of options include:

Parameter	Default value	Description
`url`	Current URL	The URL to measure tweets for
`title`	Title of the current page	The title of the page for retweets
`src`		Leading text for retweets
`via`	`true`	If tweets contain '(via @BackType)'
`links`	`false`	If links should be opened in new windows
`size`	`large`	Size of button (`large` or `small`)
`api_key`		Awe.sm API Key for custom URL shortener
`short_url`	Generated (bt.io)	Specify the pre-shortened URL that you would like to use
`background`		Button background color (e.g. `FFFFFF`)
`border`		Button border color (e.g. `CCCCCC`)
`text`		Button text color (e.g. `000000`)

Displaying recent comments, blogroll and search

The plugin also includes three other helpers to render user comments and blogroll widgets as well as a comment search widget:

<%= backtweets_comments('pengwynn') -%>
<%= backtweets_blogroll('pengwynn') -%>
<%= backtweets_search('ruby') -%>

If you would like to hit the Backtweets API for more info on your links and counts, check out the Twitterland gem.