Twitter | Joseph Tinsley

After about two weeks I’m back. Things took longer then what I expected but I did get a lot accomplished. I totally re-vamped my image hosting site, from a code perspective. Users are now required to have a twitter account to use Frinly. I’m using Twitter Oauth for log in authentication. I also added Amazon A3 service so now all of the images are hosted on Amazon’s servers. I’ve Built a Upload and Post and Post only API so that users can use 3^rd party applications to post images. I’ve changed the way incoming email is answered and dumped the script and cron job that checked a designated pop3 account. And last, but not least I upgraded the Frinly WordPress Widget so now you don’t have to hack the code to configure it to work. Now configurations are made through the options interface.

I think I kicked some ass actually. There where a whole bunch of tutorials I had to read to get this done. Two weeks ago I had no idea how Amazons cloud storage worked. Now I’m scratching my head wondering why in the heck haven’t I been using this all along. It’s awesome!

I’m not 100% finished yet. I have a few more features that I would like to add but I’m going to hold off for a couple of weeks before I start on them. I really want to work on this other project I’ve been thinking about for sometime now. I plan to post updates when I can but to be honest I know how I am when It comes to programming. It consumes me.

Overall the best part of buckling down and learning how these services work is the knowledge. I now have to knowledge to build bigger and better applications. So basically you have to look at the time spent as an investment.

Later,

Joe

Change of plans. I decided to take an opportunity I came across yesterday.
Let me explain. I subscribe to Tech Crunch via twitter, that’s my way of keeping up with who’s, who’s and the what’s going on in the tech world. Well I saw a post they made yesterday about a new twitter IPhone application that was coming out or maybe it was just being renamed, I can’t remember but you get the idea, right? So I thought why not give it a try. So I went to the Itunes App store via my IPhone and downloaded the app. I played around with it for a while and quickly became very happy with the functionality. It had a butt load of options and was totally ad free. For the longest I had been using Echofon which wasn’t.
Any who, one of the features I played around with while testing was the photo posting. Photo posting is probably one of the most important feature for me. I figure I can text my posts in if needed.

So to test this feature out I added a test twitter account to the app and posted a random photo from my IPhone. The photo showed up immediately which is great, but when I took a closer look I realized it posted the image to Yfrog. WTF, I was kind of irritated for a little while and wonder why in the heck would they use that site, I hate that site. So I went back to the app to see if there where other options I could select from that would allow me to change this out. Echofon has that feature, so I assumed they would also. Now hold your hat on what I’m about to tell you next, it’s a shocker. Not only did they have several options to choose from, they also had an option that would allow you to add your own custom API URL. Yea that’s music to my ears. First off I love using API’s and secondly I just so happen to have a image hosting site that posts to Twitter and Facebook. So that was it, I knew my night was on lock. I took a pause for a few minutes and then went straight to Burger King and grabbed a couple of those $1.00 double cheeseburgers, came back to the house and started coding my ass off. I think I went to sleep around 4 am, but had to get back up by 9:00 am, I had some shares of stock that I was trying to dump before the market bottomed out.

So to make a long story short I completed building the API for my site sometime around 5 p.m. today. It took longer than what I expected because the market went running today. If you’re curious I took home an extra 315 bucks today. But I have everything working now. You can now post images to your Frin.ly account from Twitter’s IPhone app. I’m not advertising the API right now because I want to take sometime to revamp the site before I start to let people use it. I was looking at some of the code and some of it didn’t make since to me, and I was the person who wrote it. Go figure.

Anyway I said all of this to say that I’m off track right now and things will probably be pushed back another week or so I think. But I’ll keep you posted.
Later,
Joe

Tag: Twitter

Twitter Oauth and Amazon A3

Twitter IPhone App – Custom API URL