Tweetmeme - building stuff fast in PHP

January 28th, 2008 • Related • Filed Under

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tweetmeme.png

I launched a little project today - tweetmeme it is written in PHP (of course!). What is it? It tracks the public timeline from twitter and picks up any links that get posted. It then follows each link to find final destination and then categorizes the content into blogs / video / images / audio.

This project really shows what is possible using PHP if you know what you are doing. It helps that an experienced developer like Stut did a lot of the work (hes pretty fast!) but PHP helps us mock up projects quickly and refactor when we don’t like what we see. I believe the core engine went through 3 iterations before he was happy with it.

In total 4 programmers worked on the project each bringing in various parts that fitted together on the final day (with very little effort in the end).

Facts.

  • Written in PHP 5
  • About 20 PHP files
  • Apache 2.2
  • Uses cron jobs to run about 4 separate tasks for pulling in data / processing
  • Engine builds pages then store as static HTML
  • memcache used for river
  • Subversion for managing code

Will write up a full post when I get a chance about what we have learnt about shipping this out so quickly.

There Are 8 Responses So Far. »

  1. Comment by ben on 29 January 2008:

    You guys go for it. I am really pleased you are developing the fav.or.it tool. This will be a great site and I will probably look at using your APIs for plugging into my existing blog: blog.geek.nz

    I hope you find some good coders for your application. If you have any updates to your application and any news etc then please feel free to email me:
    ben.fellows@email.geek.nz

    I’ll post any new stuff on my blog once i get it.
    cheers,

    Ben from blog.geek.nz

  2. Trackback by PHPDeveloper.org on 29 January 2008:

    Nick Halstead’s Blog: Tweetmeme - building stuff fast in PHP…

    Nick Halstead has pointed out a website, written in PHP he’s ……

  3. Pingback by developercast.com » Nick Halstead’s Blog: Tweetmeme - building stuff fast in PHP on 29 January 2008:

    […] Halstead has pointed out a website, written in PHP he’s created to help make a little bit of sense out of the links that go […]

  4. Pingback by Tweetmeme - New Social Site — Largest Social Networking Blog on 30 January 2008:

    […] Halstead who developed this fun project and through this post “Tweetmeme - building stuff fast in PHP” already described what sort of work they made for to develop this site and you should go there and […]

  5. Pingback by Tweetmeme - New Social Networking Website — Largest Social Networking Blog on 30 January 2008:

    […] Halstead who developed this fun project and through this post “Tweetmeme - building stuff fast in PHP” already described what sort of work they made for to develop this site and you should go there and […]

  6. Comment by Thejesh GN on 4 February 2008:

    liked tweetmeme, Very cool mashup.

  7. Comment by owen on 28 February 2008:

    now lets do a java version!

  8. Comment by Ryu on 7 May 2008:

    I like it, nice job I think.

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