Simple Twitter client with re-ranking

This is a simple example web-app twitter client. It does login via OAuth, retreives the user's timeline and re-ranks it by applying a weighted sum of scoring functions (a stupid example is provided).

Send any feedback to @werg.

Code overview

The code comes in two parts, client and server, the client is written in pure CoffeeScript with Backbone.js. The REST-backend is written in Clojure/Ring/Compojure, using adamwynne's twitter-api library.

We wrote this to do re-filtering of the twitter stream, which obviously is not ideal to do upon each request, but for simplicity's sake we did not include the database backend for now. To figure out how to add your own scoring functions check out the example filter definition follow-retweet-filter in server/src/cabinit/user.clj which is a map from scoring functions to their weight.

(def follow-retweet-filter 
	{ #(/ 1.0 (+ 0.1 (featx/user-prop % :followers_count)))                                          0.4
	  #(double (/ (featx/tweet-prop % :retweet_count) (+ 0.1 (featx/user-prop % :followers_count)))) 0.6})

You then need to wrap it in a function, and add it to the defroutes in server/src/cabinit/web.clj.

Dependencies

For the server make sure you have installed

• Install nginx on your system via package manager (or set up your own preferred reverse proxy)
• Get Leiningen

To build the client side coffeescript you need to install Node.js and npm Then run

npm install -g coffee-script

Getting started

Twitter credentials

Go to Twitter And set up a new app, be sure to set http://127.0.0.1/twitter_oauth_response (and not localhost) as your callback.

Next copy your consumer key and secret, and edit them into your server's config file cabinit.config:

cp server/resources/sample.config server/resources/cabinit.config

Nginx

See below for how to configure nginx

If it isn't running, start nginx

on Ubuntu:

sudo service nginx start

on Snow Leopard:

sudo nginx

Compile your client-side code

cd client/
make

Start the server

cd ../server/

lein deps
lein run c

Test the app

Find stuff at http://localhost/index.html in case you set /path/to/client/directory to lead directly to where index.html resides

Set up the reverse proxy

If you want to serve your app as a static html-file, you need a reverse proxy to get around the cross-site access restriction when calling the API.

• Find the nginx config file On Ubuntu it's in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default On Mac Snow Leopard it's in /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf

• To map the /api route to http://localhost:8000/ edit your config file to display something like this

    server {
    	listen       80;
    	server_name  localhost;
    	access_log  /var/log/nginx/localhost.access.log;
  
    	location / {
    		root /path/to/client/directory;
    		autoindex on;
    		allow 127.0.0.1;
    		index index.html index.htm;
    	}
    	
    	location /api {
    		proxy_pass http://localhost:8000;
    	}
    	
    	location /auth {
    		proxy_pass http://localhost:8000;
    		allow 127.0.0.1;
    	}
    	location /twitter_oauth_response {
    		proxy_pass http://localhost:8000;
    		allow 127.0.0.1;
    	}
    }
  

Acknowledgements / further reading

Thanks to https://github.com/kornysietsma/twitter-example for most of the oauth dance bits. Also to https://github.com/adamwynne/twitter-api for much of the rest.

We used Henrik Joreteg's ICanHaz library for client-side templating with mustache.js. In hindsight we probably should have used Handlebars since we needed helper functions, but it still is a solid library. Furthermore we used maranomynet's linkify jquery plugin to turn everything linkable in tweets into links.

License

Copyright (c) 2011 Priska Herger and Gabriel Pickard

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.