Updated Northern Ireland's Twitter directory

I decided it was time to tidy up the design of TweetNI. When I started doing that I decided it was time to tidy up the ruby code behind the design. As a result, I completely redesigned and redeveloped it.

What is TweetNI?

1. A directory

TweetNI is a website I set up in 2009 that lists people from Northern Ireland on Twitter.

The hope is that it will help you find people, either to follow or to contact.

If you wanted to find any Northern Irish journalists on Twitter, for example, you could search for journalists and assuming they mentioned the word journalist in their description, they would be returned in the results.

2. A hashtag

After launching TweetNI I included a little Javascript widget that would show any tweets containing the #tweetni hashtag on the homepage.

After a while quite a few people were using this hashtag in their daily tweets, including the likes of @utvlive, @bbcnewsline and @nidirect. There could be up to 200 tweets a day containing #tweetni.

Why the update?

1. The design was a bit awful looking.
2. Tweets weren't actually getting saved anywhere, so I was missing out on some good data.
3. People were listed by follower count by default meaning anyone who follows lots of people (generally to get more followers in return) still got listed high up.
4. It wasn't that easy to maintain thanks to my hacked together code.
5. I wanted to try out some Rails 3 development.

How I built it

It’s actually pretty simple to build and there are only a handful of tasks.

Ruby on Rails

The website is developed with Ruby on Rails.

Here’s a great step by step guide on setting up your first Rails application.

If you still need to setup Rails, Ruby and MySQL on Snow Leopard then take a read at this.

Twitter gem

Using the Twitter gem it’s easy to call the Twitter API and find out who is tweeting what.

Search for #tweetni and save the results that are returned. It’s that simple.

HTML5 and CSS3

As with any personal or side project I got to make the most of HTML5 elements and CSS3 goodness.

From Northern Ireland? Be sure to add yourself

To join TweetNI all you need to do is tweet “Just joined Northern Ireland’s Twitter directory http://tweetni.com #tweetni”

Okay, maybe not the nicest way to register people (OAuth is slicker) but one that helps spread the word at the same time and it’s quick and painless to implement.

Have you developed any projects using the Twitter API?