So word came down from the newsroom that they want to 'play' with this new technology called Twitter. One idea is that it could be a good tool for reporting via text message during a hurricane. Another thing is that other newspapers are using it, and we just want to experiment.
I've been using Twitter for a while, to make my online status updates easier. I have a number of profiles online - facebook, myspace, my personal website - and I've rigged it so that they pull in feeds from Twitter, allowing me to update multiple sites at once.
I knocked together a quick module for Pubsys (our CMS) that will pull in our Twitter feed and display it wherever we want on MiamiHerald.com. Our first experiment will be for the NFL draft this weekend, with sports reporter Dave Lopez taking charge of the posts.
One of the challenges with this project is that Twitter is a notoriously flaky site. That is, it goes down quite a bit. Therefore, we don't want to rely on their feed, as it could hang our entire page. I separated the code into two modules - a placeholder, and a retriever. This lets us load the twitter feed last, so that in case they go offline, it doesn't effect our page too much. I also experimented with caching the twitter feed, but since it creates a delay in the flow of information, we decided to abandon this approach for now.
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