The Port80 mini-talks have been really successful - there are lots of people that get very upset when we don’t have them. Unfortunately, it has been a bit difficult to find two speakers each month, so we are introducing a new component: Show us your Stuff (SUYS).
It is an opportunity to get up and show us something cool - maybe a new discovery or a new website for live feedback. You don’t need slides, or even any preparation - it’s basically a geek open-mic. We’ll try to keep it capped at 10 minutes.
We will still try to find one 10-minute formal talk each month, but if we can’t get one, there is just more time to show us your stuff!
Ok, I REALLY have to stop coming up with hare-brained ideas, and then listening to others when they convince me to implement them.
Spurred on my @cybner’s new avatar, I thought it would be cool if you could slime people in Twitter if the say “I don’t know”.
So after a couple of hours of ruby hacking, I came up with: You can’t do that on twitter. Eveytime someone says the magic words, you should see their avatar get slimed! You can even try the public timeline or your own timeline (Click here and and change madpilot in the url to your username). Note though, that because this isn’t authenticated, your timeline will need to be public for it to work.
Work out what page is requested (uses apache mod_rewrite for this)
Build the twitter URL, and request it using Mechanize
Parse the HTML using Hpricot
Append a new JavaScript file, which inserts the slime image based on an inserted class name
Iterate through the tweets, grepping for the term “I don’t know”. If it finds it, it inserts the “slime” class
On window.load, the inserted JavaScript file finds all images with that class and dynamically inserts the slime.png image above it. Using the twitter prototype instance, it gets placed over the avatar image.
I started off using Mechanize, then realised I didn’t really need it, but left it in there as it does do the HTTP request thing quite well. Download the source. Enjoy!
Update: Some good old You can’t do that on television sliming:
