Twittey-Bot :: Technical Details
Looks like Guy Kawasaki was talking (point 6) about using twitter for web 2.0 publicity again, at the recent Nasscom - Tweetup meet. Twitteybot is just that, a dead simple tweet automator :). This post deals with the technical details. The source code is available here. The overall architecture of the website is simple. The application is hosted on the Google App Engine and uses the built in persistance, user accounts, cron jobs and tasks. Starting from the persistence layer, there are are two major objects; on

Finally, I have a website !!
A weekend of hacking, some static HTML pages spiced with CSS and Javascript and I have a presence on the internet. I just published the last commit to github and have a decent looking website up and running. The site is available here.  Some of the requirements that I had set are Progressive Javascript, the site should work without CSS/Javascript also Only static content would be possible as the site is hosted on github Most contents of the site have unique URLs.  I would not rant on the design or the code of the site, instead I would simply highlight

I can see the future .. thats why I schedule my tweets
That was a neat little catch-phrase to introduce the project that I have been working over the last weekend - Time2Tweet. The project helps compulsive [or lazy :) ] "tweeters" to  schedule tweets that are uploaded file. The idea started when I was looking for a tool that lets me automate tweets, typically send things like quotations, geek humor and other things to my twitter account. There are tools to update twitter from RSS feeds or create tweet publicity, but nothing for bulk scheduling. The application is simple; all that the

Duration Input Component
Free from, input box style controls are always fascinating. Its always a pleasure to type in the dates and the computer understand it automatically. I came across the  a Date processing library that parses such free form dates. I was working on the TwitteyBot over the weekend and I needed a component where a user could enter time durations. As a requirement, the user would enter durations that resemble any of the following text 1 day, 10 hours and 15 minutes 1 minute + 1 hour Duration is 1 minute  I tried writing a parser, similar to Date.js and here it how

Autoupdating Greasemonkey Script
Firefox has automatic updates, its extensions have it, even ubiquity scripts have it; but not greasemonkey. It is not a great user experience to have to update greasemonkey scripts every time the site changes. The yousable tube fix script has a module that takes checks for new versions of the script and automatically updates them. The idea was simple and effective. The page where the greasemonkey script is hosted has a unique string somewhere in the page, that looks like #[V:1]#. The number "1" in the string denotes the latest version available. The update module is configured with the location of the script as identified by the number in the URL of th