Setting up a conference twitter feed
I just recently set up a twitter feed for the Ulearn08 conference currently happening in Christchurch. I looked at a few options for doing this:
- Have people follow a ulearn08 twitter account and then follow everyone that chose to follow this account. The problem with this is the tedious job of monitoring who was following that account and then getting that account to follow them. Also, this would pick up all their tweets, not just conference related ones.
- Use the hashtags bot - only trouble is this seems to have been broken back in June some time.
- Have people enter #ulearn08 on all conference tweets and then get the rss feed of a twitter search for the this string. This worked ok, but the rss feed does not provide links to the user photos, and I didn’t have time to mess around with the twitter api to get this.
- Same as above option but screen scrap the search results page and then wrap a ulearn header around it. I went with this option as it was quick and easy and provided the user photos with each tweet which made the page much nicer than straight text. I used the simple_html_dom php class to pull the search results div out of the page.
Things that would be nice to do for the next conference given a bit more time:
- Have the page refresh with an ajax call in the background rather than with a meta refresh.
- Get the links to show conversation threads in the search results working. These are being stripped out with a regex at the moment as the screen scrapping broke the relative links in the ajax calls.
The current Ulearn08 page is here. Copy of files used.
October 8th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Glen, you are fantastic! It has been wonderful to read everybody’s tweets in ‘real time’ and watch the action unfold. Twitteriffic informs me that there are hundred of new tweets every hour or so, so this is a great way of keeping them all together and encouraging ongoing dialogue.
October 14th, 2008 at 2:01 am
I signed up for twitter as I sat in the first keynote and had a brief play at the conference. Thanks for your work in getting this going. It was fun to play with. I can’t say I saw much of a use for it for my teaching just yet but hey! These things develop. Perhaps if I had not been at the conference it might have been one way to get a window on what was happening but honestly the content of the twitters I saw showed chatter rather than content. Maybe better twitters(tweets) (chirps) come with experience. There was one person (sorry can’t remember who) who was providing really useful back channel conversation by putting up relevant links to things the speakers were talking about. This was brilliant. Those who asked thoughtful relevant questions also added to the content of the keynote.
Thanks again for your work in putting this together.
January 16th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Glen this is great. Would you mind posting the actual php page you put together? it will certainly help me and I’m sure would help many others!
January 18th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Have added the files to end of post now Malcolm.