The coolest Twitter widget for your site.TwitSnap
UPDATE: TwitSnap beta testing is now open to the public, go to http://www.twitsnap.com to register!
TwitSnap is a FREE widget that automatically provides Twitter status preview of a user like this: @godie
Notice that I'm using the conventional reply-to prefix for Twitter and nothing else! The widget will automatically parse your page and look for the pattern, convert it into a link to user's profile on Twitter and then provides a preview of the user's most current status via a pop-up Dhtml box.
TwitSnap is built using Google Apps Engine (Python runtime), some really wicked Regular Expressions (REGEX), insane DHTML JavaScripts and of course using the Twitter API.
There are still some few things needed to be ironed out:
- Google Apps Engine where the app is hosted has a bandwidth limit; dear Google, care to donate more bandwidth to me? :D
- Twitter limits the number of requests per IP; I'm still trying to contact them on having the service get increased limit.
- I'm just piggybacking on my neighbors' WIFI; Ok this isn't really a good reason but I wish to thank her for sharing the Interner access which allowed me to work at at.
TwitSnap has been tested on only FireFox, Opera and IE.
3 comments:
damn that's slow
What about Firefox3? Since this is a recent beta work, why not include Firefox3 in the ring of browsers used?
It will prolly work with FF3 since the scripts has been tested to be mozilla compliant. IE is what worries me most at the moment.
Regarding the slowness, its because the request is directly done to Twitter API by the Google Apps Engine without caching at the moment.
... And since GAE is in beta, well not most of the time its working properly.
Then as you see my blog got tons of widgets so that slows everything down especially that TwitSnap waits for the document DOM to load fully before modifying the html body (it loads last).
There's also still some issues regarding parsing using REGEX which could break some sites (wee).
Anyway, i'm going to look for a crew to build this to something more functional -- I'm the only one working at it at the moment on my SPARE time... I'm considering working with Twitter also to have this fully develop.
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