Many of the projects I’ve been working on aren’t terribly serious. Failcount couldn’t exactly be said to be the most important endeavour mankind has undertaken. If it’s used heavily within a group, I suppose it could have a worthwhile purpose, to see when people are overly stressed, but that’s kind of incidental.
This last week, though, I’ve knocked out two simple Sinatra-based applications which are entirely and absolutely frivolous, and which both probably seem like static pages.
Are We Dead Of Swine Flu works by using the Ruby ping class to see if Google is down. Google being down is, of course, one of the key indicators that the world has ended. If the world has ended, it blames swine flu and says ‘YES’ instead of ‘NO’.
Screenshot of http://arewestillpanickingaboutswineflu.com/
Are We Still Panicking About Swine Flu does even more than that. It pulls the Twitter RSS feed for tweets containing ‘swineflu’. If there’s been no tweets within the last five minutes, then it says that we’re not panicking, otherwise the world is still in an uproar over what I like to call ‘the piggy sniffles’. (It’s much harder to sensationalise that term.)
I particularly like ‘Are We Still Panicking…’ because I’ve abstracted most of the logic out into a reusable class, and to avoid hitting Twitter’s API rate-limiting it implements caching. Since this isn’t a Rails project, I’ve had to roll my own very basic and naïve file-based caching. I’m sure it’s nothing impressive to people who do this for a living, but it seemed like an elegant solution to me and made me happy.
And when you’re doing it for the lols, making someone, even yourself, happy is pretty much all that counts.
These aren’t the only new domains I’ve registered this week. There’s a third one, and it is definitely not for the lols. Hopefully I’ll be able to write about that project later.
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