We Love LOST

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Tonight is the next-to-last episode ever of LOST. I’ve been a fan since the start, watching the released seasons several times with different friends over the years. Even powering through the Season 3 slump =). Just for fun, Richard and I chucked together a little one page app we’ve called We Love LOST.

Tech

Richard wrote the backend in Ruby on Rails. Every few minutes it uses Twitter’s search API looking for the text “welovelost”. Any new tweets it finds are saved to a database. This is an gross simplification of course. There is a blog post about the Rails stuff on the Made with Sense blog. Made with Sense is Richard’s new venture and the makers of Dispatch.

The Rails app also has a JSON API. Basically, a URL you can hit which serves up a random tweet record from the database. That gave me all I needed to write some jQuery that will pull from that URL and drop a new tweet onto the page. WebKit animations make the tweet fly around a bit before the jQuery removes it from the page.

Download

The entire project is downloadable from this post. If you are interested in how anything from the back end or the front end works, it’s all there for your perusal.

Contest

One random person will be chosen to win the complete series DVD set when it comes out. Just tweet with #welovelost to enter. I know… I kinda hate “tweet to win” contests too, but this isn’t some blatant promotional thing. The whole point is sharing the love of LOST and sharing this cool little tweet aggregation app.