Posted: August 19th, 2008 | Author: Robin | Filed under: AuckRoadAlerts, Projects, Twitter, Web Technology | 1 Comment »
Another Twitter Bot, perhaps a little boring of me, but maybe useful to Auckland Twitter users. Based on the Wellington version I made previously, just a slight tweak to the bounding box.
http://twitter.com/AuckRoadAlerts
A note to AA – if you don’t like me doing this, just let me know and I’ll take it down, it should be driving traffic to your site though.
Posted: August 11th, 2008 | Author: Robin | Filed under: Projects, Twitter, Web Technology, WellyRoadAlerts | 2 Comments »
It seems AA have updated their site using the GeoSmart Mapping API. I noticed they use an AJAX request to grab a JSON encoded object that neatly describes all the information I need. The JSON object not only breaks the incident data down into component parts but also includes NZMG map coordinates so I can choose exactly the bounding box I want to capture alerts from.
This change actually made it easier to take the twitter bot from a flaky hack to something a bit more robust in just a few minutes. I’m not sure if they intended that when they built the new version of the site, but it shows how using a really simple format like JSON for data interchange can deliver mash-up potential.
I hope AA don’t mind me scraping their data, if they do, they are welcome to get in touch.
http://twitter.com/WellyRoadAlerts
