Hackathon: Day 3

by Kyle David on December 30th at 10:26 am EST

This post is a continuation.  If you want to start from the beginning, start with Office Closed for Hackathon.

Well we ran into a little bit of a snag today with the development of twitha.com, the Twitter API.  Using it in its true form from PHP presented some limiting obstacles as well as logistical ones, so we had to convert some work from Day 2 to use the new streaming API.  To compound matters, the streaming API is only considered reliable on the .NET framework and we had a website in PHP.  Our workaround?  Write a console application to service the real-time feed and after a lot of work, volia!

Though this was an unintended obstacle, it adds some great new functionality to TwitHA.com that wasn’t intended: real-time results.  While our first attempt would have presented a delay in taking Tweets and posting them to TwitHA, it’s now completely real-time.  What to try it out?  Post any tweet on twitter with the hashtag #twitha and see how quickly it comes up on the site.  Pretty cool, huh?

We were also able to finalize the commenting system, rating error control (for all you spammers), and include a flag to allow people to kill a comment or post if it’s spam or objectionable.  Finally, our trending algorithm has been perfected and implemented so that in near-realtime the trending topics on TwitHA will be updated along with the most talked about people.

While we were really shooting for a three day development schedule, the added forth day will be well used to tighten up the functionality of the site and do some cross-browser testing.  Our remaining tasks:

1. Improve retweet methodology and refine the metric for determining the funniest.
2. Overall aesthetic polishing of the site and editing graphics where necessary.
3. Adding Facebook integration for sharing and liking.
4. Including a user profile page to show all tweets from a single user.
5. Including the search methodology.
6. Cross-browser testing.
7. Release.

In 24 hours 7-10 hours it will be complete and the last keystroke will be entered.  This hybrid of Iron Chef , meets The Apprentice, meets the Big Bang Theory will be over.