Twitter: Difference between revisions
Content added Content deleted
imported>Jesstess (Created page with 'test') |
imported>Jesstess No edit summary |
||
Line 1:
Use the Twitter API to write the basic parts of a Twitter client. See what your friends are tweeting, get trending topics, search tweets, and more.
==Setup==
See the [http://openhatch.org/wiki/Boston_Python_workshop_2/Friday_setup#Goal_.236:_get_dependencies_installed_for_the_Saturday_projects| Friday setup instructions].
==Goals==
* Have fun playing with data from Twitter.
* See how easy it is to programmatically gather data from social websites that have APIs.
* Get experience with command line option parsing and passing data to a Python script.
* Get experience reading other people's code.
==Suggested exercises==
<ol>
<li>
Customize how tweets are displayed. Look at the <code>Status</code> and <code>User</code> classes in the [http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/source/browse/twitter.py| Twitter code] for inspiration; options include the URL for the tweet, how many followers the sender has, the location of the sender, and if it was a retweet.
</li>
<li>
Write a new function to display tweets from all the trending topics. Add a new command line option for this function.
</li>
<li>
The code to display tweets gets re-used several times. De-duplicate the code by moving it into a function and calling that function instead. Example prototype:
<pre>
def print_tweet(tweet):
"""
tweet is an instance of twitter.Status.
"""
pass
</pre>
</li>
<li>[Long] A lot of the Twitter API requires that you be authenticated. Examples of actions that require authentication include: posting new tweets, getting a user's followers, getting private tweets from your friends, and following new people.
Set up oAuth so you can make authenticated requests.
http://dev.twitter.com/pages/auth describe how Twitter uses oAuth.
http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/ has examples of using oAuth authentication to make authenticated Twitter API requests.
</li>
</ol>
|
Revision as of 18:10, 13 May 2011
Use the Twitter API to write the basic parts of a Twitter client. See what your friends are tweeting, get trending topics, search tweets, and more.
Setup
See the Friday setup instructions.
Goals
- Have fun playing with data from Twitter.
- See how easy it is to programmatically gather data from social websites that have APIs.
- Get experience with command line option parsing and passing data to a Python script.
- Get experience reading other people's code.
Suggested exercises
-
Customize how tweets are displayed. Look at the
Status
andUser
classes in the Twitter code for inspiration; options include the URL for the tweet, how many followers the sender has, the location of the sender, and if it was a retweet. - Write a new function to display tweets from all the trending topics. Add a new command line option for this function.
-
The code to display tweets gets re-used several times. De-duplicate the code by moving it into a function and calling that function instead. Example prototype:
def print_tweet(tweet): """ tweet is an instance of twitter.Status. """ pass
- [Long] A lot of the Twitter API requires that you be authenticated. Examples of actions that require authentication include: posting new tweets, getting a user's followers, getting private tweets from your friends, and following new people. Set up oAuth so you can make authenticated requests. http://dev.twitter.com/pages/auth describe how Twitter uses oAuth. http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/ has examples of using oAuth authentication to make authenticated Twitter API requests.