Twitter API

I've gotten to use the Twitter API for a handful of professional projects, but I mostly use it for fetching my personal status updates and displaying them in various places. It's a very fun API.

Here are 6 projects that I've worked on tagged Twitter API.

derek.broox.com

April 2022

derek.broox.com is my general home page, online scrapbook, and development playground. Its primary purpose is to catalog my life and allow me to play with various APIs and web development technologies. It serves up thousands of photos, check-ins, microblogs, blogs, maps, videos, and various other data from my life. Since 2001, it has been a constantly evolving web application.

v8 - latest version

This is the first version of my site that I completely rebuilt in a new language and platform. I moved the entire site from a containerized LAMP stack to a server-side-rendered (SSR) Nuxt.js application that relies completely on the Broox API to power its content. I chose Nuxt and SSR in order to keep my SEO and open graph / social sharing meta tags intact while still providing a speedy, asynchronous client-side browsing experience.

7 previous versions

v7 November 2012

After learning about responsive web design during the Obama campaign, I rebuilt the front-end of derek.broox.com to be leaner and work better on mobile devices. I also dockerized the application so that I could more easily spin it up on my dev machines and deploy it to new hosts.

v6 September 2009

This version of my site was built to make my blog a bit less prominent and focus more on my internet presence as a whole. This is also where I really began experimenting with geodata and APIs like Flickr, Twitter, Brightkite, Foursquare, and Facebook.

v5 April 2006

After working with Truespin Media on several professional sites, I finally felt I gained enough experience to completely rewrite derek.broox.com. I didn't want to rewrite the site until I was absolutely sure that I was writing extremely solid code that would actually make the site function better - not just look different. Visually there isn't a whole lot of difference between this release and version 4, however the back-end was completely rewritten. With the complete recoding of the site I greatly enhanced several features. A few of the those include: content tagging, photo handling, database calls, and paging. This version of the site is much much lighter, much quicker, and a lot more clean.

v4 November 2004

This version of derek.broox.com was simply a reason to learn more about design with Cascading Style Sheets. Though this design did include a couple back-end changes, I focused mainly on design. I definitely accomplished what I set out for in that I learned a great deal about using CSS effectively. Major back-end code additions included tagging and paging for photos. Throughout this design's life there were several add-ons made. Some were back-end changes, most were content changes.

v3 September 2003

This version of derek.broox.com was mostly just content and design changes. I tried to simplify the design a bit while adding much more content, including audio, videos, a biography, and links to my friends' sites. One cool addition was that on the homepage I made the random photo of myself change to photos of friends when you hovered over links to their websites.

v2 January 2002

Version 2 of derek.broox.com was the first version of my blog on the subdomain: derek.broox.com. Prior to that my blog resided at www.broox.com. This version was mostly just content and design changes. I added some random photo functionality to the site that would load random pictures of me in the homepage header, and random pictures of other things on other pages. Other than that, not much changed between the first version and this version.

v1 July 2001

Before I started Broox Extreme, my personal site resided at broox.com. This was my very first PHP driven personal site and blog. It was also the home of my first random picture generator which displayed new images on the side each time a page would load.

Broox Integration

April 2022

Broox Integration is a containerized set of scheduled and manually run Python scripts that I use to manage the data that powers the Broox API. Its primary purpose is to sync data with various social networks (Flickr, Twitter, Foursquare), but I also use it for things like moving photo assets to cloud storage providers or running batch operations on my local data. All third party API response data that I fetch is cached in a Mongo DB and then manipulated to store only the relevant data in the MySQL DB that powers the Broox API.

Tweet your Rep

October 2011

Tweet Your Rep was a simple application that allowed supporters to easily post tweets to their state representatives based on current issues. It allowed Obama For America to create a promotional campaign, select the chambers and parties to target, and then add some pre-built tweets templates for supporters to use. I architected and built the API layer and basic CMS as well as integrated it with the Twitter and the Sunlight Labs Congress APIs.

Des Moines Alive

April 2011

Des Moines Alive is a personal project that my friend Nick Leeper and I built to help Des Moines Area folks find awesome local bars and restaurants. In addition to general merchant info, we provided users with aggregated data such as reviews, foursquare tips, merchant tweets, etc. We designed Des Moines Alive to be very lite and easy to navigate. The goal was to provide our visitors with the information they wanted as quickly as possible.

v2 - latest version

Nick and I decided to use this version of Des Moines Alive to learn new things, play with APIs, and switch our focus to local businesses. We built our own custom PHP MVC, with ideas borrowed from our experiences with Rails and Kohana. We redesigned our database to be more efficient. We also began using many more APIs such as SimpleGeo, Google Maps, Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter to aggregate data and give our users more information.

1 previous version

v1 April 2005

Des Moines Alive is a personal project that Nick Leeper and I developed to help Des Moines Area people find new and cool places to go. We focused primarily on restaurants and bars but also gave information about local sports and recreation. The main feature was to allow visitors to review any of the locations listed. We designed Des Moines Alive to be very lite and easy to navigate. The goal was to provide our visitors with the information they need as quickly as possible. At a year old the site was getting thousands of hits daily and had hundreds of reviews submitted. Des Moines Alive was also featured in local print media.

Valley West Mall

January 2010

Valley West Mall is a long time Red Five client and was sort of a guinea pig to test out the latest version of our SiteMan CMS and the brand new javascript/HTML5 based SVG map UI that we'd built. Rebuilding the Valley West Mall site with our new technology was a great learning experience. We greatly improved our CMS, made things much more efficient and moved from Prototype to jQuery. Rendering maps with javascript rather than flash meant they could be viewed on mobile devices, iPads, etc. In addition to these great new features, Valley West requested to be integrated with their Twitter account. This allowed me to build a twitter plugin for the SiteMan CMS which would allow the mall to easily post tweets as well as monitor mentions and replies.

SiteMan

February 2009

SiteMan is a Content Management System that we built at Red 5 Interactive. It was originally built so that mall property owners could manage each of their mall property's websites. However, once we realized how powerful our system was, we decided to generalize the app so that we could deploy it for all of our clients. We rebuilt SiteMan to allow our clients to easily manage a single website or a group of websites. This way, a parent company could edit any of their child company websites, while employees of the child companies would only be able to see and manage their respective site. The front-ends of the sites managed by SiteMan were also completely extracted from SiteMan itself, which was great for 2 reasons. First of all, it allowed us to more easily keep all of our clients' systems up-to-date in that we were just updating SiteMan and not touching their presentation layer. Secondly, it also allowed us to launch new campaigns and designs for clients very quickly without touching the content management system. When we deployed SiteMan for a client it came with a core group of tools like user management, web page editing, file management, audit logs, etc. From there, custom tools could be added as plugins. These tools included functionality like, announcements, events, careers, photo galleries, stores, social networking, etc. We also built SiteMan in a way that allowed users to customize their tool layout. Any user could pick which tools they used the most and arrange them in a way to get a quick snapshot of the exact data that they were interested in. Tools could be added, removed, or sorted at any time - and everything remained just as they left it on their next visit. This application was very Javascript heavy, making extensive use AJAX, dialog windows, and WYSIWYG editing. As such, we had minimal page loads which provided a very streamlined experience for our clients. I am very proud and excited to have worked with such a great team on this app. It was so versatile and simple to keep pushing forward.