With Teenormous, we started giving away free tees to people that tweet a link to us. Problem is, we couldn’t find an easy solution to archiving/looking back on tweets for the month. Twitter keeps the tweets seachable for a very short time. We found a few web apps/services that did some similar things but not exactly what we wanted. We even tried Google Reader by putting the search RSS feed into it. (That worked, but trying to scroll and count to #57 is a royal pain and that method just doesn’t scale.) So, some poking around led me to the excellent Ruby library for Twitter by John Nunemaker which uses the Twitter APIs.
It’s so easy to use it’s laughable. A few hours later and I have an app/script written that stores the results of any twitter query (like the one we care about) into a static HTML file with them in order from oldest to newest and each tweet numbered for easy random picking of winners. It also automatically creates a new file each month. I used the Twitter CSS so it looks nice and clean. Slap it in a cron job and we have auto-archiving twitter searches. Plus – it’s in HTML format in case we want to put them online for some reason.
It’s nice sometimes to do a little coding project that’s not exactly what you typically do. Oh – and Ruby rocks.
