Javascript hack weekend: Unique projects to inspire awesome hacks | Hacker News Reader

Javascript hack weekend: Unique projects to inspire awesome hacks

blog.nowjs.com

83 pointsericz11 comments

This is a project I wrote the weekend of the Japan earthquake. http://tensecondstotokyo.com/

I wanted to see what was happening in Japan live from the people who live there.

I used node and socket.io to provide a realtime view of photos posted to Twitpic on Twitter. The server stores the last 100 photos found, so that's the max that are ever seen. Just a stream of photos.

Other than a few friends at work and some folks at a node.js talk I gave a few weeks ago, no one else has seen this. Well, I did show it to Mikey from Instagram when I ran into him at a coffee shop.

I'm also working on integrating Instagram's photos too, but haven't finished that yet.

Couple of notes:

1) There's never been more than a handful of people accessing the site at a time, so I have no idea how well it will scale. There's almost no load, so I suspect it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

2) My url parsing regex fu needs some work. If you watch the stream with dev tools enabled, you'll see a number of 404s from Twitpic where non-existent photos are being accessed. Don't worry, these don't show up visually on the site though.

Would love people's feedback, suggestions, and complaints. Especially from design-type folks. I'd like to give it a better look.

Conact info: @geuis or geuis.teses@gmail.com

Ideas:

- Add images a row at a time (threes), so that you don't lose track of an interesting image.

- Add options for other places, or to let the user enter it themselves

- Translate the tweets to a user selected language

(In case you've not seen it, take a look at TwitterNode (https://github.com/technoweenie/twitter-node), which makes using twitter's streaming API very easy in node.js.)

Is this for the whole of Japan or Tokyo only?

Whole of the country. Its geo centered on the Imperial palace in Tokyo though, but the range includes all of the country.

I don't know if this counts as a hack (certainly it took a lot longer than a weekend) but here's my web-based timeline software done mainly in JS: http://www.tiki-toki.com

If you don't need the real time element that NodeJS/NowJS offers, may I suggest you give http://www.akshell.com a go. Real time features are in the works, but aren't currently publicly available.

We're really keen to see people experiment with server side JavaScript on the platform and will instantly answer any queries you may have on our mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/akshell

What do you mean by "if you don't need the real-time element"?

I mean that if you're building a typical web app that uses the request/response cycle rather than requiring real time push from the server using Comet or WebSockets, Akshell, with it's synchronous I/O, should be easier to work with.

Oh, I see. So it works as normal it just doesn't have server push yet. Gotcha.

Made a project last weekend using the raphael.js + the Facebook API.

http://shalecraig.com/friendspore

Since it's all local (no node + etc), your data stays with you.

Similar to Popcorn.js but more for visual effects:

http://www.cacophonyjs.com/

(self plug :)

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