Madness

Tuesday July 22, 2008 at 10:18

“He was cute in a God-fearing sort of way.”

— Tara Hunt (Twitter status). I’m so going to start using this to apply to anything.

Sunday May 25, 2008 at 1:09

Mod_rewrite hell

I’ve been living in mod_rewrite hell today. There are lots of different ways to get clean urls in ColdFusion, none of them I particularly like. The classic trick, is just to append all your variables to the end of the file like so:

/twitter.cfm/var1/value1/var2/value2

Then you use OnRequest in your Application.cfc to manage the list of variables with a little bit regex. This works, and I was using this in my Twitter app, but I hate having twitter.cfm in the path. It just looks ugly. So, I spent a while today, trying to work out how to do the same thing with mod_rewrite.

After a bit of searching, and a lot of reading, this is what I came up with. There are better ways to do this, but this works for this app, and I know that I will not be passing more than 3 variables back through the quesry string.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^.*..*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [L,NC,QSA]

RewriteRule ^twitter/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)$ twitter.cfm?$1=$2&$3=$4&$5=$6 [L,NC,QSA]
RewriteRule ^twitter/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)$ twitter.cfm?$1=$2&$3=$4 [L,NC,QSA]
RewriteRule ^twitter/(.*)/(.*)$ twitter.cfm?$1=$2 [L,NC,QSA]
RewriteRule ^twitter/$ twitter.cfm [L,NC,QSA]
RewriteRule ^twitter$ twitter.cfm [L,NC,QSA]

There are several ways to try and make this dynamic, and I did work on a perl script that used RewriteMap to build out the string. However, it keep doing something strange, and I just gave up on it. This type of approach has a 9 variable limit, due to the way that mod_rewrite sees $1 and $10. However, it works for me, and it’s working damn well, I might add.

In case your wondering about the items at the end of the rewriterule, they mean: last rule, case insensitive, and append query string. The rest is all just simple regex.

Go play around with it: http://themadness.org/twitter/

Thursday May 22, 2008 at 12:34

Permalink ∞ | Tags Twitter iPhone

Twitter app with update status and post counter

Thursday May 22, 2008 at 11:03

Permalink ∞ | Tags Twitter coldfusion

Twitter ColdFusion API interface

So, as I mentioned before, I’m sick of constantly having to wait on Twitter, or worst, not being able to catch up on things when Twitter is down, check status here. Also, the iPhone clients don’t allow you to browse by user or view more than the last 20 posts. So, here’s my offline version of Twitter. It allows for browsing by user, by day, and it breaks the record set into groups of 20, with pagination (unlike the mobile Twitter site). When logged in, it also allows for posting messages with text counter, and a link to reply to Tweets, which is really useful on the iPhone. I also use regEx to find usernames in Tweets, and link off to the users page on Twitter, along with regEx on links, to make them clickable. If you have ever looked at the data from the Twitter API, you’ll quickly realize that it takes a bit of work to make the data useable in the way that the Twitter site is useable. There is also an auto login feature, so you don’t have to type in your username and password (not sure if I will release that portion, as it presents a security problem if you know the URL).

These links are designed specifically for the iPhone, so if you view them in anything else, you will still be confined to the 320px divs. I’m still working on a followers page, and an API call to tinyURL, on post. Once these are done, the source code will be posted.

http://themadness.org/twitter.cfm

You can turn off user images by using this link: http://themadness.org/twitter.cfm/turnOff/1/

Monday May 19, 2008 at 16:55

Permalink ∞ | Tags

Coldfusion REMatch

I’ve been working on a Coldfusion Twitter API client for a couple of days, and it’s almost done. Link coming soon. In the meantime, check out the use of REMatch, which is a new tag in CF8, for regex matching. In previous versions of CF, if you wanted to do a search and replace with regex, you had to loop through the data over and over, until you reached the end of the text, each time starting from an array value stored in the previous regex result. Not any more, REMatch gives back and array of all results from the text, and allows you to then easily replace each result. Code sample inside a CFScript tag:

i = 0;
l = 0;
testForUrl = reMatchNoCase(“https?://([-\w.]+)+(:\d+)?(/([\w/_.]*(\?\S+)?)?)?”, twit);
if(arrayLen(testForUrl) gt 0){
for(i = 1; i lte arrayLen(testForUrl); i = i + 1){
twitLink = “#testForUrl[i]#”;
twit = replace(twit, testForUrl[i], twitLink);
}
}
testForName = reMatchNoCase(“@[-\w.]+”, twit);
if(arrayLen(testForName) gt 0){
for(l = 1; l lte arrayLen(testForName); l = l + 1){
contactLink = “#testForName[l]#”;
twit = replace(twit, testForName[l], contactLink);
}
}

Sunday May 18, 2008 at 21:35

Permalink ∞ | Tags Twitter

The reply to status in Twitter

I’ve been banging my head against a wall for the past 30 minutes trying to figure out how the reply to status in Twitter works. In the API, when you call your timeline, it returns a in_reply_to_status_id and in_reply_to_user_id. On the surface, it seems that Twitter is doing some kind of magic, that knows when you reply to a status message, to associate it with a particular message. However, there is nothing in the API documentation about sending the status_id of the response. After a few tests, there is really nothing magical going on at all. It simply finds the last status_id for the user your are replying to, and associates it to that message. I haven’t looked at how direct messages work, because I rarely use them, but I would assume they work the same way. This makes true threading very difficult. Perhaps, if using the Twitter website, the reply feature actually does know which status_id to reference. But I’m unable to prove that.