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Casual Development Part II: Egorcast

April 26, 2007

In part one of my series on casual development I highlighted the ‘what‘, now I will highlight the ‘how.’  

THE HOW:

Once we decided to build a Jott to Twitter application we had to figure out how to do it.  Of course we would be using the Ruby on Rails framework, but how would it work?  The actual operation of Egorcast would be fairly simple. 

  • Step One: We create a unique @egorcast.com email for each user.
  • Step Two: The user enters that @egorcast.com email in their Jott.com account.
  • Step Three: The user enters their Twitter login information into Egorcast.
  • Step Four: The user calls Jott and records a message and it magically appears in Twitter.

Of course, I decided to make things a little more complicated.  Leo Laporte left Twitter for a competitor called Jaiku.  I suggested, what if Egorcast could be a gateway to both platforms so that people would not have to choose between the two.  Then Mike suggested that we include the ability to post to your blog as well.  Suddenly the simple application got a little more complicated.

Jeremy was able to whip up a simple design in CSS within a day and we happened to have a logo ready to go (from another project we cancelled last year).  We printed out the API documentation for Twitter and Jaiku and Scott reviewed it over the weekend.  Twitter uses a simple REST API, while Jaiku uses a key based XML-RPC interface.  Next we implemented the Metaweblog API to post to WordPress blogs.  Finally, we selected Postfix to process the email.  By Tuesday night we were demoing Egorcast at DemoCampDallas2.  It was working well by Wednesday night.  Check it out yourself.  For our next installment I will explain the WHY. 

 

Written by Alexander Muse · Filed Under Blog 

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