EduTwt Work Continues
I’ve made quite a bit of progress to EduTwt over the last few days.
For starters, in addition to building Twts, the small URL redirects, it will now post messages to Twitter. Here’s an example. As soon as the app is launched, I’ll ask Twitter to add the “from EduTwt” bit to the date line.
The Twitter API is easy to work with, and there are some very helpful classes out there that made the job even easier. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like to send a Tweet using EduTwt:
A few notes about that box there. First, you can store as many Twitter accounts as you like. If you manage multiple accounts, such as a general institution account as well as an account for another campus office, I think this may be helpful. Second, I’m building in the ability to automatically paste one of your saved EduTwts into the message.
A quick word about storing Twitter login information. Some people balk at services like EduTwt, HootSuite or TwitterFeed storing your login information, which I can totally understand. My plan is to not store Twitter account passwords, instead using Twitter’s new OAuth setup. For now though, I’m storing the login credentials of this particular user, a test account I setup, in a database.
I’ve also been putting a quick wrapper around the pages to make it look a little nicer and make it easier to jump around to the different services. Here’s a quick snap of the actual main content area on the home page. I’ve cropped out the header and footer for now because they are ugly. 
Click for a larger version.
I’ll report back when I’ve got more to share.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
