My Bank Holiday Project: Tweet GP

This is my latest project - a simple little web app that plays back twitter feeds from F1 races. It’s just like a Sky+ box, but for F1 tweets. If you miss the race, you can still watch it with all the best commentary from a hand-picked selection of the Twitterati.

Events go live on Tweet GP the moment the coverage starts on the BBC, so even if you’re only minutes behind the action, you don’t have to miss a thing.

It should work on all modern browsers. I’ve tested in on the current versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari (both on the desktop and on iOS). It also works on IE8 (although it doesn’t quite look as sexy). If anyone can test on IE9 or Opera, I’d be grateful for feedback.

If all you want to do is get time-shifted tweets, go straight to tweetgp.com now.

If you’re of a very geeky persuasion, feel free to read on and get the back story of how it was all built.

A few weeks ago I was sat at home watching the Malaysian Grand Prix. I had woken up at 8am, which was too early for comfort on a Sunday morning and, crucially, two hours too late to watch the coverage on the BBC live.

Thankfully, like the rest of the civilised world, we have a very smart HUMAX set-top box that time-shifts TV for us, so I was able to watch the TV coverage from the start (in HD – thank you, BBC).

However, I had to put my iPhone down and stay away from twitter for the duration of the race in case I found out the result. This meant missing out on the insight and comic talents of several people I follow who usually make the race a much more enjoyable event.

Now, being a hacky kind of guy, I decided I could solve this problem with code (and at the same time learn something new). In time for the Chinese Grand Prix, I’d cobbled up a bit of Node.js code that connected to the Twitter streaming API, and sucked up a live stream from all the interesting F1 people, pushing it into a local Redis instance.

Using that lot, I was able to get out of bed at a sensible time to watch the action in Shanghai, without missing out on the comedy stylings of the likes of @sniffpetrol. Much rejoicing.

Since then, I’ve spent my bank holiday weekends packaging that lot up in a shiny HTML5 box. Everything on the client side is done without any plugins or proprietary extensions. As such, the code should work on all modern browsers (I’ve tested it on Chrome 11, Safari 5, Firefox 4, IE 8 and iOS 4.3).

I’m using express to serve up the front-end pages. All the code’s written in coffeescript, and the styling’s done in sass. Live tweets get pushed straight to the clients using Redis pubsub and socket.io. The server lives in the Rackspace Cloud UK.

And that’s it! Well done if you’ve read this far. I think next I’ll be signing up for a go on Twitter’s Site Streams beta API, and seeing if I can generalise this a bit. Fancy having a recording of all your tweets ready to playback for any TV program? Watch this space!