Evan Sims

TwitterBash launches

Today marks the launch of TwitterBash, a concept conceived and designed by my good friend Judson Collier. Judson hired me on to work on the project about a month and a half ago, and I think we’re both quite pleased with how it turned out.

TwitterBash takes the concept of the long Internet-famous bash.org, which allows folks to post snippets and quote conversations from IRC, and applies it to Twitter. Just sign up for an account, then head to the submit page. Pop in the permalink for a tweet you want to quote and you’re done. Tweets can be voted up or down by users, and we base our popularity index off that score (which we call karma.) You can even embed quoted tweets into your own pages using a number of methods.

I think Judson came up with a great concept here. It’s simple, it’s fun, and people will hopefully have a great time using it.

For those curious about the tech behind it (that was my department, after all), TwitterBash runs atop PHP5 and the wonderful CodeIgniter framework. Thanks to CI, I was able to rapidly pump out a prototype in a matter of days for Judson and I to begin playing with.

Give it a look, bash your favorites and have a good time!

Web APIs by Example, Part I: Twitter

APIs, or application programming interfaces, are essentially standardized methods for applications to talk to one another and share information. In desktop applications, the operating system provides a full range of APIs in order for your programs to run and interact with it (in Windows an app might register itself as an option for when you right click an icon; or on a Mac an app will hide itself from the dock.) On the web, APIs are usually provided as a means of importing data to other services, or using third party clients to push information to your account.

Since Twitter is all the rage these days, I thought it would be a great starting point to introduce you to the world of web APIs and how simple they really are to work with. Twitter, like most presencing services, has a very limited range of API calls because, well, it’s a very simple service. The documentation for Twitter’s API can be found hrere. The Twitter API, all be it simple, has allowed great applications like Twitterific and Twittervision to be created.

Continue Reading ‘Web APIs by Example, Part I: Twitter’ …

Running Apache, PHP and MySQL on Windows.

Here at home, I run a local apache install to make building and testing my web projects easier. Instead of having to constantly upload files to my web host, I can save them locally and refresh my browser to see the result. It’s easier, and because I run my local server off of my laptop, it provides the added bonus of allowing me to work on projects while I’m out of the house, on a plane, or otherwise don’t have Internet access.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about getting Apache and PHP up and running in a Windows environment, and a lot of people give up and use bundled packages like WAMP or XAMPP. These are fine choices, but I like to do things myself, and install just the components I need or want. I also think it’s important to have a good understanding of Apache and PHP configurations, as they can come in handy when you’re trying to debug your application after it’s gone live on a web host.

Continue Reading ‘Running Apache, PHP and MySQL on Windows.’ …