Twitter Sifter

This is a simple node app for watching and hearing tweets.

Setting things up

1. Make sure you have node installed for your operating system - you can get it from https://nodejs.org/en/download/

2. With npm (which is installed with node), install bower and grunt:

npm install -g bower

npm install -g grunt-cli

3. Download the needed node/bower components (these will take a few minutes to complete):

npm install

bower install

4. Create config.js

Create a file config.js in the main directory that contains your twitter keys:

  module.exports = {
     "consumer_secret": "your-twitter-consumer-secret",
     "consumer_key": "your-twitter-consumer-key",
     "access_token": "your-twitter-access-token",
     "access_token_secret": "your-twitter-access-secret"
   };

You can get these by creating an "app" at twitter at https://apps.twitter.com/

Don't commit config.js to a public repository!

5. Build the web app side of things

grunt

Do this any time you modify files in the public directory.

It puts everything needed for the web side in public_dist (creating public_dist if necessary).

6. Start the server portion

In a command window, start the server portion

node twittersifter.js --track hello,hi

The example above will catch tweets that contain "hello" or "hi". You can also omit --track and then set terms from the client.

7. Watch and Listen to Tweets

Open a browser using web address http://localhost:8080

By default, the tweets are "colorified" based on how BeeLine does this - this simply gradually changes the color of each character from red to black to blue to black to red. This may improve readability for fast-moving text, but other options need to be explored (for example, maybe color parts of speech certain ways). This can be disabled in the current settings.

"Interesting" Tweets

This currently uses Cynthia Whissel's "dictionary with imagery", where words were assigned pleasantness, activation, and imagery scores. This dictionary is used here with permission of C. Whissel. Commercial use of this dictionary is not permitted. Check with C. Whissel at [email protected] regarding such uses of her dictionary.

If you want to try different approaches for what "interesting" means, just tweak the method ponderTweet in the file pondertweeets.js. This is a web worker that is passed the tweet content for every tweet received, and can send those tweets it finds "interesting" back to the main page via the method sendBackInterestingTweet.