For The Skril of It

I recently created a new site, Skril, which is a prediction engine with Twitter oAuth for login. So far, the only game running is the daily, "What Will the Dow Industrial Average Close At Tomorrow". If you guess correctly without going over you could win the game prize.

Skril started out as python project (Tornado + CouchDB) but quickly morphed into a ruby project (Doozer + Unicorn) sometime last week. I had a great time learning about CouchDB and it's potential applications. In the end, I found myself starting to rewrite some of the base functionality that I've put in place with Doozer and just said, "Enough, already!"

Give Skril a try. If you win, I'll give you an Amazon Giftcard. Good luck! When time permits, I'm going to add a new game type for predicting the final scores of Basketball and Football games.

Doozer Rides the Unicorn

I added Unicorn support to Doozer this evening.

Add 'server: unicorn' in your app.yml clusters section and that's it! To start the server from app_root: script/cluster -C start.

To start the server with an Unicorn config-file just pass '-c FILE' to the cluster script.

Doozer support for Unicorn was necessary because Rack doesn't come with a default handler like it does with CGI, FastCGI, Mongrel, EventedMongrel, SwiftipliedMongrel, WEBrick, LSWS, SCGI, or Thin.

Twitfaced - Real-Time Twitter/Facebook Client

I coded a demo application called, Twitfaced, using Tornado Web Server and Framework. It has a few minor dependencies (see the readme).

The basic functionality allows you to stream your twitter timeline and/or facebook newsfeed in real-time. It also handles updating statuses to both, as well.

Future improvements include:

1. Retweeting and @Replies
2. Facebook Post Commenting
3. Better error handling