Redesigning TouringPlans.com

Mr. Blu Bird on my shoulder…

Today, I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine. Please say hello to Mr. Blu Bird! This little guy will sit on your shoulder and tweet happy little disney messages in your ear all day long.

Well, that last bit isn’t entirely true… but pretty close.

How this all came about

The story on this one isn’t particularly long or interesting. Sometime around the end of last week I thought it might be cool to check out the Twitter API. I didn’t have any particular project in mind, just wanted to see what it was all about.

Come to find out that the API is really awesome, and totally dead simple to use.

So I whipped up a little rails app after work and started to mess with things. All-in-all, development time spent on this was less than 6 hours. I spent a lot more time sorting out the details of it’s deployment. With the use of the new and totally awesome Feedzirra ruby feed library, deployment on a shared host just wasn’t going to be an option (though I did beat my head on that wall for the better part of Sunday night). I just couldn’t make all the custom gem requires play nice, so I reverted back to the always stellar Slicehost.

I swear, every time I’m frustrated with another host for some project or another, I end up back at Slicehost and they never disappoint. So with a new slice up, I had my little project deployed in under 30 minutes.

So, that’s really that. I just wanted to get my hands dirty with the Twitter API. I plan to add some cool features since I really had fun getting this far.

I hope you like it!