Utilising the TweetMeme API

We’ve been integrating some social media into one of the sites we work on ModernSelling and specifically working with the TweetMeme API which allows users to view the number of Tweets an article / page has received and retweet said article. From the horse’s mouth:

The TweetMeme retweet button is for website and blog publishers who want to encourage their audience to tweet their content on Twitter. The button shows a live count of the number of times your webpage or blog post has been tweeted.

There are a few points worth mentioning about this integration because it is not always as straightforward as you might think and perhaps some of this information will be of use.

Firstly, TweetMeme is quite strict so for anti-spam purposes uses a combination of the Tweet which we send to the API and a custom meta tag containing a match of the tweet:

<meta name="tweetmeme-title" content="The Message of the tweet " />

Additionally, the content / message of the tweet has to be a direct subset of the HTML title tag. For instance, for the example above, “The Message of the tweet” needs to be included in <title>. It doesn’t have to be the only thing in the title tag but it does have to be present.

So if like us you are generating these things on the fly (the site in question is driven by a content management system we built) you may have to make adjustments to your system to accommodate the TweetMeme functionality and also discuss compromises with your client; for instance, in our case, the title tag now includes the original title (which was specifically written for SEO purposes) with the article headline (which we want to be the body of the tweet) appended to the end. There is no way around this; the tweet message cannot contain something that is not contained in the HTML title tag so you need to live with it or not use the TweetMeme API.

Secondly, TweetMeme uses a cache which means that if someone already tweeted your page/s before you implemented the TweetMeme functionality the tweet will already be cached against the url. In these instances, if you wish a retweet to use the a new message as opposed to the old, incorrect message (your old title tag if it was incorrect) you need to clear the TweetMeme cache on a page-by-page basis or, rather than doing a manual update for a large number of URL’s you can automate the process and use the TweetMeme ping api (http://api.tweetmeme.com/ping?url=). Just append the URL that you want to update at the end of it and loop through the list of pages on your site.

Finally, part of the site we implemented this feature on is subscription only so bare in mind that any password protected url is not going to allow the TweetMeme API to make a call back to the page to verify it – TweetMeme will not work in these circumstances.

Happy TweetMeme’ing!

This post was written by Kirsten on June 22, 2010 at 4:42 pm

Flixel 2.0 – Flash game development

We have finished an enjoyable project for SPAR International, which involved creating an athletics game based around the button bashing classic, Daley Thomson’s Decathlon. When creating the graphics and style for this game we wanted to utilise the nostalgic bitmap effect which you see quite often in Flash games and in the graphic style of Pixel Art. From a development perspective this was very convenient because I have been looking for an excuse to try the Actionscript 3 game framework, Flixel, which I have seen lorded around the Internet as perfect for this purpose.

It has it’s own global render cycle which simplifies the process of adding bitmap graphics to the stage and creates a predictable fps independent game loop. Forum posts on the Flixel site state that this rendering process is more efficient than Flash player alone due to the fact that is purely geared toward low resolution bitmapped graphics. There where many elements which increased the speed of development such as the inclusion of the FlxObjects which are already set-up with simple motion facilities such as acceleration and velocity on both x and y axis which allow for the simulation of horizontal character movement and also vertical forces (i.e. gravity).

There are many other noteworthy features of the Flixel framework such as Sprites for Animation and the global/static FlxG control class which have been very well designed to make game development in Flash easier. I will, however, not go into detail about these because a concise post about Flixel from the Inside RIA blog has covered these. For those (developers mainly, I suspect) interested in understanding the affordances of using this framework over creating a game from scratch, reading this and also exploring the host of games and tutorials on the Flixel site will be worthwhile. Canabalt is a particular favourite game due to the intense screen shaking and accompanying music.

The game we created is called Beat Barni and is online now. Due to time constraints we created a pentathlon (5 events) rather than a decathlon, so feel free to challenge Barni to any of the following events; 100m, 400m Hurdles, Javelin, Pole-vault and Long Jump.

This post was written by Gareth on June 2, 2010 at 10:00 am