All Geekness Great and Small

Archive for February, 2009

I’m in Long Beach this weekend, attending the BIL Conference. BIL is an open, self-organizing, emergent, arts, science, society and technology conference. Anyone can come; anyone can speak. If you have an idea to spread, start talking. If someone is saying something interesting, stop and listen.

BIL takes place next to TED, which is a high powered annual conference, bringing together luminaries of Technology, Entertainment and Design. The ethos of BIL is that you don’t need to be a luminary to have a great idea.

It remains to be seen quite how effective BIL is. The people I’ve met so far have been a great bunch. I’ll be blogging about this for the next couple of days, so watch this space.

On Monday, I announced the launch of preDevCamp. There has been a fantastic global response and today I’d like to announce the fanclub that we’ve set up on Facebook.

Palm are taking some real interest in this camp and a Facebook fanclub is a great way to demonstrate the level of interest. Please show some support for preDevCamp by signing up.

While you’re at it, swing over to http://predevcamp.org and sign up to one of the events. Coding the Palm Pre is going to be a dream if you have any experience with developing with AJAX, so get involved! If there isn’t an event in your city, let us know and we’ll guide you through the process of setting one up.

As part of the preDevCamp 2009 site, I created a JavaScript TwitterFeed today.

A sample can be seen here. If you leave this page open, it will constantly update with all Twitter tweets that contain the word ‘twitter’. It will update once every 5 seconds and will contain no more than the 25 most recent tweets.

Installing this code into a page of your own is very simple. You will need the following:

• jQuery must be installed and you must include it in your webpage
• tweetFeed.js must be included in your webpage
• tweetFeed.css should be included, although the function will work without this file
• A <div> with an id of ‘tweets’ somewhere on the page

With all of those in place, it’s a simple case of instantiating the feed:

var tf = new TweetFeed(searchString,feedPeriod,feedLength);

searchString

This is the string that is used to generate the feed. The feed will contain all tweets containing this word

feedPeriod

Number of seconds between each refresh of the feed

feedLength

Maximum number of tweets to show. At the moment, this must be > 15 or else the feed doesn’t work properly.

All of the relevant code can be found by looking at the example, linked to above. Feel free to use this in any way you like. Comments are welcome

Today, @whurley, @giovanni and I launched the Palm preDevCamp.

For those of you not familiar with what a DevCamp is, it’s an event to develop applications (local and web based) for the Palm Pre using the Mojo development SDK. They’re open to all-comers and we’re really looking forward to getting our hands on this new platform and coding some apps.

Take a look at the preDevCamp site. If your home city is not there, just get in touch with @giovanni and, Hey Presto!, you can lead the first local camp!