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OBSOLETE - Domain is no longer working and Twitter account hasn't been active since 2010.

Get tweets about new questions on Stack App sites

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About

I am fed up sitting all day refreshing the home page waiting for that elusive question on symfony that I can answer and who uses RSS these days? So using tags and massive fonts you can now get a tweet with a link the the question title in your update stream. It uses twitter oAuth and makes friends with http://twitter.com/stackoftwits. You will get @updates from @stackappbot. You don't want to follow that account really as if your friends all follow stackappbot you will see a lot of stackappbot posts in your stream! I didn't like the idea of using DMs as this usually generates an email which could also get annoying.

Searches on the following sites are possible:
Stack Overflow
Super User
Server Fault
Also all the current in beta stackexchange sites.

As more sites come out of private beta they will be added.

Go play

Thanks to my employer I now have a proper domain. http://stackoftwits.com/ (offline now)

Development

I've built this using symfony but the I have been trying to make the StackApp api code non-library dependent. I do plan on releasing the code that handles this once I've tarted it up.

Contact

Email me (my username at gmail)
Tweet me @johnwards

Future

Adding the ability to search the other 2 sites in the trilogy. Now a feature, also editing the site that searches run on
Add question ids and get tweets when answers/comments are posted.
Sleep mode. No messages during a set period. Now a feature
Bug fixed due to tag searching being an OR search rather than the expected AND, see here
Now working with API 1.0 thanks to my PHP wrapper which will be released once I've finished it, I've only implemented the parts I need so far.

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  • 3
    That's cool and all, but what happens if a lot of people use it and you go over your API request rate (on twitter)
    – Matt S.
    Commented Jun 29, 2010 at 0:49
  • There is no limit for post requests on twitter only get. I don't do any get requests as I don't look at anything. If I hit the rate limit on bit.ly then I'll create my own shortener. If I hit the rate limit on SO then I'll have a winning product and Jeff and his team will hopefully look kindly on me.
    – johnwards
    Commented Jun 29, 2010 at 5:47
  • 2
    At least that domain name doesn't need a hyphen to disambiguate it from a site for gender reassignment specialists.
    – Bill the Lizard
    Commented Jun 29, 2010 at 12:48
  • @john help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/15364 This says it's 1000 a day. It's still a lot, but easily broken with an application like this. I'm not sure if the API request rate also factors in to this, I always forget, but that's at 150 per hour
    – Matt S.
    Commented Jun 29, 2010 at 14:32
  • 1
    @matt I think that is old stuff. They rule of thumb now is to look on the docs for each of the methods you are using. The rate limit is listed on there. I am using the update method via oAuth for sending the messages and according to the docs there is no limit. dev.twitter.com/doc/post/statuses/update
    – johnwards
    Commented Jun 29, 2010 at 18:25
  • How can you make it stop?
    – jjnguy
    Commented Jul 6, 2010 at 23:00
  • Remove the search from the website. Is that not clear enough? Should I make a change?
    – johnwards
    Commented Jul 7, 2010 at 6:54
  • @john Oops, I thought I had removed them already. Great app btw.
    – jjnguy
    Commented Jul 7, 2010 at 14:12

1 Answer 1

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Awesome! Will use.

I just have a few questions:

  1. What time zone is the site in? I'm asking so that I can set the "I don't want any messages between the hours of..." part correctly.
  2. How do you include/exclude multiple tags in a single "search"? Can we use the same formatting rules/conventions that search on the SO website uses?
  3. How are you going to evade being rate-limited by the Stack Apps API?

Also, you should apply for whitelisting on Twitter if you get a lot of users. They don't like it if it looks like you're possibly spamming people.

Good luck!

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  • 1
    1) Currently it is in GMT+1. I am looking at changing this to the users timezone or make the timezone pickable. Still mulling that over. 2) You can use spaces, commas or semi-colons to separate tags, but choose one don't mix and match. 3) The rate limit of 10,000 a day is very high so I don't think I will be hitting it soon. Jeff has said that it isn't a maximum just a limit and to email if people hit it, so we will cross that bridge when we get to it. (If you like it an up vote would be great so I can be eligible for the competition, need about 6/7 votes :( )
    – johnwards
    Commented Jul 2, 2010 at 6:54

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