Friday, January 22, 2010

Using TwitterFeed to send certain del.icio.us bookmarks to Twitter

TwitterFeed is a really cool service. Using Twitter feed you can push any RSS feed to Twitter, which enables a super simple way to push pretty much any kind of syndicated data to Twitter (and now Facebook, Laconica, and HelloTxt).

I also use del.icio.us to save interesting bookmarks in a easily accessable persistent location.

The problem was several fold:

  • Twitter is a great way to talk about things (including links)

  • Twitter isn't so great at categorizing links and making them easy to find later

  • I wanted to save links on del.icio.us but share them on Twitter

  • Not everything I shared on del.icio.us was something I wanted to spam my Twitter followers with.

Turns out the solution is pretty simple. On del.icio.us you can create tags. These tags help oranize bookmarks.

For each tag you can get an RSS feed (see where this is going?). RSS feeds for tags look like this:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/<username>/<tag-name>

You can also visit the tag's webpage and select the RSS feed button next to the URL bar (then record new link in the URL bar):

I selected the tag name tweet-this for this set-up.

The next step is to visit TwitterFeed and get set-up with an account. Once you've got your account you'll be at a Feed Dashboard, select Create a New Feed and enter the previously recorded URL:

Select test rss feed to make sure everything is working.

The rest is point and shoot with the TwitterFeed set-up process. Now, only bookmarks recorded on del.icio.us with the tweet-this tag will show up on Twitter.

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Thursday, January 21, 2010

Exponential Visitor Graph (Ebay)

I thought this was fairly entertaining...

I wrote a simple page hit counter for a couple Ebay / Craigslist listing we were doing (using Google's AppEngine, and Yahoo's YUI).

Recently I added a feature to allow it to graph visitor counts over time (basically a cheesy analytics engine).

I guess one of the items was particularly desirable (a very complete, good codition SNES system with a lot of games) because it had what I image is probably a pretty typical graph of visits to an Ebay auction:

It's pretty obvious that the spike (a huge spike) in visitors is when the auction was about to close when everyone was manically hitting reload. Just eyeballing the graph, it looks like an exponential increase.

[Source for this post in Markdown mark-up]