• Greg: Hey, I like those Instaparks twitter feeds you made. Is there any way to look at the photos without all the annoying clicking?
• Henry: Nope. Want to help me make one?
• Greg: eh… You should see if Rustin can make one.
• Henry: Will do.

(So I changed it a bit… but the idea is the same. The actual tweets are here.)

I chatted with Henry a few days later and it sounded fun, so that night I made this: Instaparks.com

The whole thing took about an hour to make. I actually spent more time setting up a server to deploy it than I did building the app itself. That speedy turn around is completely thanks to the great work Henry did setting up the feeds. He’s doing all the hard work pulling the pics that get posted to Instagram from inside the Disney parks. I just made a little app that finds the image links out of those tweets and arranges them on a page that you can zooooomify.

I hope you dig it.

That being the case, I use this site, Twitter, Facebook and now Google+ for the same stream. I cross post, which I know drives a lot of people nuts. The only reason I do, though, is because all my friends aren’t in one place. I’m not curating a specific kind of content for each channel… just presenting myself to that crowd.

Now, I’m finding that I just don’t have desire to present myself in so many places. With the addition of Google+, I’ve hit some internal tipping point that makes me feel too spread out. I’m not sure why having a blog, twitter & facebook feels fine, but I add just one more and it feels odd.

The opposing factor in all this is my love for new-ness and fun new things to experiment with. I jump on the bandwagon for every new service that comes along, but it fizzles quickly if I don’t come up with a plan to work it into my routine. If it’s not in my routine, it feels like an extra load trying to ‘create’ content for the new channel… and that turns into the odd feeling I mentioned before.

Conclusion: I’ll probably fall away from the new kid (Google+) even though I really quite like it. I’ll end up hanging where my friends are. If I can get them all to move I’d sure love to ditch Facebook.

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!