Hey.... made a few updates since this was posted... a little better filtering, and some new UI.  You can check it out in it's current state at http://www.webandflowdesign.net/livetweets

I know it's been quiet around here, but recently I've been working on an HTML5 web app that will be used to display a scrolling list of tweets at an event I'm participating in.  It's been really neat diving into some of the features of the HTML5 world, like local storage.  It's essentially jQuery and some supporting PHP for the ajax stuff.

Wanna play with it? Click here.

Here's how it's meant to work.... meant to because it's still very much a work in progress.

First, it searches twitter for some string. Throughout the development so far, it's been a few different things - but as I'm writing this it's just looking for anything with the hashtag #google.  PHP returns a JSON object to the jQuery in the browser which then get's parsed by a few methods I've written.  This PHP script is called once every 5 seconds right now.  It's a youth event so we want to be very cautious about what content actually makes it to the big screen.  So one of the methods I've built iterates over all of the tweets that get returned checking for any one of over 1800 words and phrases.  If this filter gets tripped, it immediately discards that tweet and bans the user by adding their twitter handle to an array of banned users (kept in local storage, in the browser - it's a zero tolerance policy).  The other filter, is checks for banned users.  Once a user is banned, the jQuery won't even look at their tweets again.

If a tweet is good, it gets passed to the method I'm using to cue the tweet up for display and using some cloning and prepending - new tweets get added as they come in.

But I also wanted to be able to add some controls in the event that we wanted to either highlight a tweet or (if questionable content did make it through) ban users manually.

So, each tweet has with it a few extra controls.

It's far from complete, but it's really a neat little app - if for no other reason because of the HTML5 features that it's using.

If you want to play with it at all, you can see it at http://www.webandflowdesign.NET/livetweets.  I'll be working on it a lot over the next few weeks so don't be surprised if you try to play with it and it's doing something incredibly awful.  And, I'm doing most of my development testing in Chrome/Firefox right now.  I haven't even tried to open it in IE - I wouldn't recommend it :)

If you play with it at all, let me know what you think so far.  I'd love to get your feedback!