The awesometer
March 31, 2013
I wondered the other day – where is the most awesome place on earth RIGHT NOW? That made me think two things:
- we overuse the word awesome
- it would be cool to use this as an excuse to use the Twitter streaming API
So I fired up npm, installed ntwitter and within minutes had simple program that printed out to the console time there was a tweet (with a location) that had the word ‘awesome’ in it. I then got it to store them in a MySQL database as well, and excitedly got to work hacking together a PHP script to read the tweets from the last hour and output them as JSON.
It was an amazing moment when I loaded up the page and saw it working properly for the first time. Unsurprisingly, the place where awesome is mentioned most often is in the US, but it’s interesting to watch the red moves across the country through the night.