Twitter Stats/Tweet Stats/Man am I Tired!

So nearly a month to the day after releasing my Twitter Stats perl script, I finally made a webified version. You can check it out over at TweetStats.com.

This was really more of an engine for me to get up to speed on Ruby on Rails (RoR) than anything. I’ve been wanting to play with Ruby for a while now, but really just didn’t have the motivation. I’d like to keep making regular updates to the site as there are several features I’m hoping to add such as dynamic graphs that allow you to zoom in on your timeline, an auto-follow bot that will keep your stats constantly up-to-date, and a widget you can put on your site if you so desire. Although I’ve enjoyed working on the site, I would like to relax for a little bit.

The experience with RoR has been fairly pleasant. It’s a well thought-out framework that lends itself to quick and efficient development once you wrap your head around the model. The only downside, and really what kept me from being able to put the site up faster, was the usage of some gems like BackgrounDRb. While a great idea, a fractured development community and somewhat buggy coding gave me many a headache in the past week, ultimately leading to two redesigns of the backend code and consumed two weekends of my life. I won’t say the code is perfect, it’s far from it. But it’s been fun and hopefully people enjoy the site.

The Internet is an invaluable resource and you can find many links I used via my del.icio.us rails tag. The most useful by far was Dominiek.com’s Building a .Com in 24 hours and you will see similar design patterns on my site. I had this page open nearly the entire time I was developing the site. It was a great aid throughout the entire process.

Finally, a special thanks to somebody that sat up with me throughout the night as I muttered away coding to myself.

Continue reading » · Written on: 01-27-08 · 13 Comments »

13 Responses to “Twitter Stats/Tweet Stats/Man am I Tired!”

  1. Kiss my shiny metal… » Blog Archive » Twitter Stats/Tweet Stats/Man am I Tired! wrote:

    [...] Read the rest of this great post here [...]

     January 27th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
  2. andrew c. » My Twitter Stats…New and Improved wrote:

    [...] A newer version of the stats generator makes the results much more pleasing to the eye: check out Damon Cortesi’s blog for more info or go get your own stats here. And here are my revamped stats (in 2 pictures, because [...]

     January 27th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
  3. hemant wrote:

    Which version of BackgrounDRb plugin, you were using? Did you try posting your problems on the list?

    If you followed Domineik’s advice and tried using the old version, you will surely encounter problems. Also, its a open source project and I will give commit rights to anyone with a single patch under his belt.

     January 27th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
  4. Queco Jones wrote:

    Not to be greedy/ungrateful but, any chance of you creating a widget (or something) that one could add to a blog/site that would update periodically/automagically with one’s stats? ;)

    PS: I guess the site must be getting hammered… All I get is a 502 error. :(

    January 27th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
  5. sfoak wrote:

    Nice job… hopefully the site being down is a sign of the high traffic.

     January 27th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
  6. Damon wrote:

    Hi Hemant, thanks for the comment! I was, unfortunately, using the old version. After trying to deploy the site and getting some errors, I upgraded to the trunk version.

    I didn’t post on the mailing list (my apologies, I was being stubborn) but I will make a post with my experiences.

    I do have a patch for meta_worker.rb as it didn’t seem to be reading in the pool_size configuration.

     January 28th, 2008 at 9:08 am
  7. Damon wrote:

    @Quenco A widget is definitely in the future. Something I wanted to make for this release, but didn’t have time.

    Keep trying on the site, I’m still dealing with load issues, thanks. :)

    January 28th, 2008 at 9:13 am
  8. Hemant wrote:

    I will be glad to listen/solve your problems.

     February 2nd, 2008 at 10:06 pm
  9. kosmar wrote:

    loving it.

     February 3rd, 2008 at 5:22 am
  10. Anonymous wrote:

    I posted about your Twitter stat tool at http://poetslife.blogspot.com/.

    http://susanreynolds.blogs.com/boobsonice/ had a notice about it so I tried it. Pretty cool.

    Maybe Mahalo or Scoble will pick it up because it deserves more circulation.

    I do security work…but all volunteer…CERT, TACDA, jihadi monitoring, etc.

     March 25th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
  11. akhel wrote:

    Hi, I submitted tweetstats to http://wtips.blogspot.com/2007/04/twitter-tools.html

     March 26th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
  12. Jeff wrote:

    TweeterStats is an awesome tool. Kudos for great work. I’ll be spreading the word.

     April 6th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
  13. Mark Neigh wrote:

    Do you have a way to see stats on different languages being Tweeted?

     April 18th, 2008 at 9:41 am

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