Harvest Tweets and display them with the Awesome Board

Simple application we use to harvest tweets about our company real time and then have them displayed in an application. The name Awesome Board is in fact somewhat of a joke and we don't actually think it is that awesome :)

The Harvester utilize the Twitter Streaming API and stores the data in MongoDB. The Awesome Board is an ExpressJS web application which reads from the database and displays the data.

We use this at FINN.no to display customer feedback on various screens in our office

Pre-requisites

• Sign up for a Twitter account. You need this in order to authenticate with the Streaming API.

Installation

We currently only support storing the tweets in MongoDB. Therefor you must install it in order to get started.

• Install MongoDB on your machine or on some server

First clone the application

    $ git clone https://github.com/finn-no/awesomeboard.git

and then just install the awesomeboard with NPM

    $ npm install

Now that you have everything installedm you need to configure the application in order to make the Harvester and Awesome Board work. This is done by editing the appConfig.js file, below are a description of the settings.

• databaseHost - hostname running MongoDB
• databaseName - name of the MongoDB database
• databasePort - 27017
• webappPort - 29099
• twitterUsername - username
• twitterPassword - password
• trackItems - an array of strings to identify what tweets to trac
• follow - an array of Twitter IDs to follow

Usage

In order to have anything to display you need to harvest some tweets, here is how you start the harvester.

Start your MongoDB instance

    $ mongodb --dbpath <some location>

Starting the harvester

$ node harvester/harvester.js

Starting the Awesome Board

$ node webapp/app.js

Now you can check http://localhost:29099/ or you can view the list mode on http://localhost:29099/list

FAQ

• There are no Tweets displayed even though my harvester is running: The Harvester uses the real time Streaming API, which means that someone needs to tweet right this moment in order for you to see anything. To test you can just pick a trending topic on Twitter and you will have tweets displayed in no time. The Harvester logs every time it harvests a tweet so you can just keep an eye on it and you will know when you actually have tweets available.

About the Awesome Board

The board application uses jQuery, Mustache for JS and the eventHub JS libraries in order to make it's magic. The list view is pretty crap, but we might get round to fixing it.

Contribute

Feel free to fork this and do what ever you'd like with it. This code is licensed under the WTFPL-license.

Any questions or to get notifications follow our @FINN_tech on Twitter.

Developed by leftieFriele and joodland of FINN.no check out the FINN.no developer blog for more cool stuff.