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.
Man I love Lost to. Was just listening to the music on Youtube. Awesome! Let’s just hope they don’t screw up the last few episodes. My theory: The flash-sideways is what is actually happening after the story on the island is over. They probably reset something again by accident and they all end up in the plane not knowing what happend.
Nice site, as far as the story goes I love Lost, I just hope they don’t end it with – “And it was all a dream” :)
i just lold. Couldn’t agree more.
Chris, this is some seriously cool stuff Looks great, will download tonight when im home from work! Thanks!
nice efect! i love lost!
we love lost!
I thought season 3 was pretty good compared to season 5 lol.
+1
With Lost finishing, and have’n watched all episodes, it is going to be a challenge to find something that compares to the Dharma Initiative!
Chris …. r u getting into Rails?
Oh man…Tuesday nights are going to seem so empty now. Loooooove LOST!!!!!
Didn’t Lost used to be on Wednesday or Thursday?
Everybody loves LOST !
What a cool idea.
I am very broken hearted about what happened with Jin and Sun but I will be watching until the bitter end.
My most pressing question right now (since they said we will probably know MIB’s name) is who David’s mother is and whether Daniel will end up with Charlotte.
The ‘app’ definitely looks ‘Awesome-ER’ in a webkit browser.
Needs work for FF. lol
But interesting idea.
When you have watched all of the Lost series check out HULU.com. There are all kinds of shows on there.
I sadly have only seen season 1. :(
The “tweet” class looks better when there is no background applied to it, instead of “black”. Just sayin’.
Overall this is unbelievable. Love it!
OMG I’m going to be sooooo sad, its bad enough I was crying 2 episodes ago and I’ll probably be the same when it ends :*(
As a fan and supporter of yours, I’m so happy you watch LOST as well =)
The “dispatch” alignment is funky on the iphone.
Tried to show it to some friends, but the dispatch bar was in the way.
Great minds think alike! We started a blog by the same name earlier this month, and we’ve teamed up with Jami Losurdo who has started “Thanks to Lost” day on twitter, which will be this Friday. The more the merrier! I’ll try to add your info to our blog, too. Perhaps you can also include #ThankstoLost in your code since so many people will be tweeting it on Friday, and please feel free to mention our blog and send your own message there. We’d love it. :)
DeAnne (aka whmscl)
welovelost.wordpress.com
http://welovelost.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/thanks-to-lost-day-this-friday/
Nice little app!!
I remember. Years ago, we have to learn for a really hard test in physics. So, I joined a friend and we want (really!) to learn. But when I get there, he watched an episode of LOST. And we said “just another, then we will learn”. We watched seven episoded, then I had to go home *g*
Well, here in Germany i still have to wait to see Season 6
too bad thats the last one!
Thanks for adding #ThankstoLost to your program!! That’s awesome! I mentioned you again on our blog. :)
Do we?
#welovelost too, I am in Kenya, I just have to wait for the DVD :(.
I think the season finale was dumb. They really did a bad job on that. I love lost also but they killed the ending
lost boring :) we love stargate atlantis ;)