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Thing A Week 4 - Bird Watcher

This week might count as a partial failure plus I’m getting the post up pretty late, so that’s probably not good either.

Once again I tackled a project for the wedding. I want to build a system that listens to Twitter and Instagram for photos that are tagged #daveandeileen then pulls them in and displays them somewhere at the wedding. This week I decided to finish up the Twitter listener.

This listener is basically just a small Sinatra app that uses TweetStream to listen for tagged tweets and then if it matches the criteria (has image and is properly tagged) it stores info about the tweet into a database. This same database will eventually hold Instagram (this was the whole reason I signed up for Instragram) data and then I’ll need to write a nice front end that pulls the photo data out and displays the pictures in some nice way.

I call this week a partial failure because I got the app working locally, but ran into some trouble getting it deployed properly. I am not a great sys admin, but I’m learning a few things. This is also the first time I’ve set up a database on my VPS. I’ve really been spoiled by always working with databases through a nice visual interface so doing some Postgres work while sshed into my server felt like pulling teeth. I was just running into some issues pretty late on Sunday night so I ended up admitting defeat and went to bed. You can check out the code for this project on Github.

This next week (the week we are currently experiencing right now) is pretty busy. We’re trying to finish up a bunch of other big wedding things (stuff that doesn’t involve coding) and my parents are in town this weekend, so I know I’m going to be limited for “thing a week” time. I would like to use this week to finish off the deployment for Bird Watcher. I feel bad about letting a project spread over two weeks but I think it’s best for my schedule and this project.