Robin Marshall - Open Source Web Development » Twitter

Auckland Road Alerts - Twitter Bot

Robin — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 02:14:46 +0000

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.

WellyRoadAlerts Twitter bot back in business thanks to JSON

Robin — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 04:03:12 +0000

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

Oil Price Twitter Feed

Robin — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 03:00:57 +0000

After my last post, I realised I hardly ever drive to Wellington anymore anyway, trying not to burn any more hydrocarbons. Perhaps a more political version than WellyRoadWorks, but certainly more interesting to me, is this twitter feed I created which shows the oil price change whenever it moves up or down to the next whole dollar. Whether political, geological, or purely a function of over-eager oil speculators, the message is clear, everything that depends on oil is getting more expensive.
http://twitter.com/OilCrash

Background image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/good_day/152342733/

Scraping content from: http://bloomberg.com/energy