twur.li - days 4,5 ...

I haven’t written the last week, and I guess the suspense is killing all 3 of you, that read this blog.

On day 4 (the day before [Cruise](https://twur.li>twur.li was going to be written) I set up the continuous integration and deployment server. My goal was to use <a href=) instead of cc.rb, but after much fiddling with XML configuration files and Rake tasks, I gave up and returned to cc.rb. It works, is relatively easy to set up and suits our needs fine. Why bother?

Day 5, the friday, came and we had to do some last minute changes to a project that was launching on that day (no, we don’t believe in taking it easy). Then the actual work started with me grabbing Andrea and Keith and walking them through a complete Cucumber, RSpec, Implementation phase of the first feature. This took quite a bit longer than expected, but gave a good introduction of the BDD concept to the two. After that, they started to implement more of the UI functiionality, while I started working on the backend that talks to Twitter.

After a pizza break, work went really smooth and we made great progress. Twur.li was able to collect the twitter stream of it’s friends, extract the URLs and store them in the database. Andrea and Keith even managed to make a good looking layout. When Flöre and Kaspar arrived for the first Zurich Twitter Beer around 18:00, the system was up and running and started to look like what I was envisioning.

Well done, and I hope that Andrea and Keith both learned something and had fun as well. I know I did!

The last week both Andrea and Keith were away (school and holidays respectively) and I took the opportunity to tinker with twur.li and expand it’s features so that it actually does what it’s supposed to do: gather the URLs of the people you are following.

Right now, we are reading over 4000 users twitter streams and have collected almost 30'000 urls. There are Atom feeds for users and friends of users, a lighting fast search engine and lot’s of ideas on how to move on…

So, if you are on twitter, follow @twurli and then visit twur.li/your_twittername and twur.li/your_twittername/friends to see what your friends are linking to.