What is twitterchats.com?

Twitterchats.com is a little website I created in my spare time using Python, Django, and the python-twitter api. It came about over the course of 3 or 4 weekends as a way of practicing my fledgling python and Django skills. Along the way, I learned a lot about python (list comprehension ROCKS!), Django (way cool, dude) and python-twitter (Thank you Mr. D Clinton).  I even got to extend the python-twitter api and expose a couple of attributes not exposed by the api. Way cool.

Twitterchats.com falls into the category of 'time waster'. There are no productivity claims being made here. It's just fun to reload the page and see another random chat displayed. Sometimes, they are funny, somtimes sad, and somtimes, NSFW.

What does twitterchats.com do?

Twitterchats.com is a Twitter app. It goes into the timeline and randomly picks a reply status (the status has to be a reply). It then works its way backwards through the Twitter timeline building the twitter conversation that took place. Finally, it displays the chat as a web page.

Why do the chats sometimes consist of only one status? Where is the rest of the chat?

As twitterchats.com works its way through the chat, it will stop once it reaches the original (originating) status, or a private or protected status. At this time, twitterchats.com will not display twitter statuses that are protected or private, even if you are a friend of the twitter user. (We don't ask for your user name or password which is why we don't show private statuses). 

Sometimes, only one reply is shown because the originating status is the very next status and it is private.

Who am I?

I'm Hani, your host. I am a novice programmer who learns best by doing and decided to create this little twitter app as a programming exercise.

Why advertise?

To make money of course. Not that I expect to make much but I'm hoping to at least break even on the hosting cost I am incurring. A little extra would not be amiss either  ;) .

Why Django and Python?

I've been interested in web app programming for a couple of years. In that time, I dived into, Ruby and Rails, PHP, PHP Cake, and recently, Python and Django. It's a steep hill to climb, learning wise, though, but I have to say that python was easy. There were still learning curves, but somehow, the hills were not as steep and it stayed fun throughout.  Django was much the same way.  While Rails seemed cool and was definitely trendy, I quickly hit walls that I could not seem to get through and learning stopped being fun. That never seemed to happen with Python or Django. I do have to say that a little bit of Python will make the Django journey ever so much more fun and concepts easier to grok. At the very least, I would recommend a few of the quick-start tutorials available on the web.

BTW, if you're looking for an absolute beginner python book, I would recommend Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner by Michael Dawson. It's a lot of fun working my way through the book (and I'm not done yet). 

Who hosts twitterchats.com?

My hosting provider is Webfaction.  So far, they've been great and I recommend them. They support Django out of the box and there are tutorials and forums to help you get started. Their desk support is the best I've experienced with any hosting provider.

Feel free to check them out and if you do sign up for a plan, please use me as the referrer. You can either use this link or just enter my ID, hanism, in the referrer field when signing up.

Thanks go to...

In no particular order...

• Twitter.com
• Python.org
• Djangoproject.com
• D Clinton for the python-twitter API.
  
• Python and Django tutorials and the authors thereof that are too numerous to mention, but thanks guys! The free resources online boggle the mind.
• TinyMCE (used internally).
• Blueprint CSS for making site layouts super easy for non-designers like me!
• make your own speech bubbles used for site branding.
  
• And, of-course, my wife without whose support and encouragement this project would not have happened.

What's next?

Well, I have a few more features in mind for the website including a 'mail this chat' link and topic specific chats on their own pages. And of course, tops on my to-do list is a 'contact me' form [done :) ]. Feel free to contact me using the contact us page.

Stay tuned and visit often. I hope you enjoy this little time waster.

Sincerely,

Hani S M