Build a Twitter Analytics App
2 The First Step: Design Your Solution
6 Writing the Backend Twitter Server
Writing the Code in Small Parts: Part 1, The Basic App
Part 2: Adding a Counter to Exit
Part 3: Adding Language and Retweet Count
7 Adding the Data to a Database
8 Testing: What and How to Test
9 Displaying our Data using the Flask Webserver
9.2 Adding templates to our Flask app
9.3 Displaying our Tweets in the Flask Web Server
10 Future Work and Improvements
Okay, so this is the last section. You should have a bare bones Twitter Analytics engine working now.
But if you compare it with mine, http://www.twitteranalytics.org.uk/, you will see a few differences.
One, mine is just prettier 🙂
The reason is simple: I just used a Bootstrap theme, specifically this one. You just take your existing HTML code, and copy paste it in the Bootstrap theme files. There might be a bit of moving/cleaning stuff around, till it looks the way you want it to look.
You will also note that I do a lot of other stuff. Like, checking for countries, swear words etc. The thing is, once the logic is there, adding all this stuff is easy. I just search for these terms in the Tweets.
The code for the live website is actually here. It’s not as clean as I wanted it to be, but I wrote it in a hurry, so that I could demo the concept. Have a look.
The code still will have bugs. Remember our try-except block in the Twitter streaming class, where we were doing a pass because we got some malformed tweets?
Well, now that we have a statistics class, we can log those error tweets to a file. That way, we can analyse them and study how to work around them without skipping them. Of course, not all can be parsed. Many of these bad tweets are deleted tweets (which is strange to me- why are deleted tweets being displayed in the first place?), so we can do a check like:
|
1 2 |
if tweet == deleted: continue |
I won’t do that for you, but you have enough info to do it now.
You can make a lot of other improvements / add features. Like:
1 Check if the Tweeters are men or women. Most people dont share this info, so you’ll have to use other methods to guess, like their names.
2 Check where most Tweets are being posted from. Again, not everyone shares his info. Could you guess from their tweets?
3 Try to guess the age of the people tweeting. As a simple rule, anyone tweeting about Justin Bieber is less than 18 🙂
Let me know what progress you make, or if you get stuck.