In my last post I set out a few ideas about some of the improvements (you can see my complete series of Twitter posts here) I was thinking about making to improve my twitter feed. In essence I was toying with the idea of tweeting on certain subjects for a 24 hour period.
Over the past few days I have been working on a basic implementation for the ideas I mentioned.
The system, which is now live, chooses randomly from a set of a domains and then tweets about that domain for the next 24 hours (I may actually change this so that it tweets for a varying (random) amount of time for each domain). I did face a number of issues when I was implementing the system.
By far the biggest was populating the database of tweets. It is not exactly complicated but very time consuming. I’ll outline the challenges that I faced in a future blog. Indeed, I am still facing problems as I write this and this is an area that I need to revisit as the quality of the tweets are really down to the quality of the database. My current thinking is to start the database again, from scratch, but at the moment it is serving its purpose.
Another problem I faced was that part way through implementing this new system, my old system stopped tweeting. I am not sure if this was something that I changed (I don’t think so) or whether it was a change made by twitter. It actually took me a long time to resolve this and I eventually had to bite the bullet and access the twitter system via the OAuth mechanism, which is the recommended way. So I am now doing it the way they want me to, rather than the legacy method that I was using. So, if nothing else, I have made a change that was probably long overdue and that, hopefully, will stand the test of time.
The new system is far from complete. I still want to add the functionality where people can register for domains of interest to them so that I can inform them when I am about to tweet about a subject in which they are particularly interested. I also want to add other types of tweet (not just journal articles) that I hope will inform people (and publishers) about what I am doing; but more of that later.
But, the basic system is up and running and I have started to write some of the supporting web pages. If you are interested, take a look at http://www.graham-Kendall.com/twitter, although these are also earmarked for considerable updating.
I’ll let this new system bed in for a while and then do some more development. But, I have to say, that I am pleased with the system so far. I think that it is a lot more useful than just randomly tweeting scientific papers. At least now, if you are interested in a certain topic you can just keep an eye out over a 24 hour period, or just do a search (each tweet is tagged with #orj and #XXX, where XXX is a three character code representing the domain).