I was pleased a few months back to see Calvin College sign up for twiter. A small college in the Michigan town where I lived for three years up until last summer, the college is my wife’s former employer, a previous client of mine, and a place that dominated quite a bit of our social life in Grand Rapids. Twitter seemed a simple way to keep up with what was going on without much effort. But within a couple of months I stopped following them, partly out of frustration with some recent political developments on the campus but primarily because their twitter presence felt far too much like an anonymous broadcast, and close to an abuse of the medium.

It’s an example I’ve had on my mind while pondering the possibilities for official twitter usage at Greenbelt. Twitter is easy to use as a broadcast medium, and (recent stability concerns aside) works very well for getting messages out quickly to those who choose to hear them, but to treat it solely that way fails to engage with the realities of how it’s used, or the set of expectations that have emerged within the community of its users.

There are contexts in which a broadcast-only approach can work. The automated twitter feeds for things like Tower Bridge and Low Flying Rocks are quite understandably just broadcasting updates. They represent inanimate objects and are simple prototypes of how a system like twitter can change the way we interact with such objects. At the same time the way that the Mars Phoenix twitter account has been used has been fascinating, making use of the fact that there are human intermediaries involved to engage with its audience and answer questions.

Barack Obama’s account has been broadcast-only so far. I find that far more understandable as a campaign schedule of the sort he lives within doesn’t make engagement easy, but also a little disappointing as that aspect of politics desparately needs more interaction and transparency. The Downing Street account occasionally offers responses and it’d be good to see that from the Obama team, along with some information on how Obama’s tweets come to be. Are they along the lines of John Edwards‘ which I’m told were approved in communications team meetings but sent by the candidate himself, or is there some other process/person making it happen?

I’ve been enjoying the Channel4News offering lately. That too has yet to respond to any of its followers (so far as I’ve seen), but the slightly irreverent tone of some of the posts really helps give some insight into how their editorial process works, how things shift through the day, and the fact that they don’t take themselves entirely seriously.

The recent Innovation Edge conference and Social Innovation Camp made pretty good use of twitter. In the former case it was entirely focussed on the day of the event, but modelled good interaction between official-tweeter and those in the audience also using twitter. What it was lacking was some transparency: it wasn’t until after the event that it became clear who was posting on behalf of the event. SI Camp has continued to operate, and it’s a good way to keep up with the thinking and projects that have stemmed from the camp. At the event it offered a really good communications channel, identifying different groups’ needs and interesting comments, but since then it’s not been clear if it’s a personal account or entirely focussed on the followup to the event. Some clarity there would be helpful.

Obviously any high profile use of twitter shouldn’t be expected to respond to every message sent its way, but setting expectations and demonstrating some engagement with the conversation is vital for any user whose tweets aren’t entirely automated. Establishing transparency by identifying who is actually doing the posting is very helpful, whether per post (eg. “(from @jystewart)”) or simply in the bio (”with posts of official news, gathered by X, Y and Z”). And it’s probably best to be flexible, and adapt an approach based on how followers respond, just as twitter itself was adapted in response to the community’s use of @replies.

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One of the numerous projects I’ve been juggling over the past few months has been a redesign of the Greenbelt Festival website. That redesign went live late last night.

Working from Wilf’s designs I initially built new HTML and CSS templates and began to establish some rules for how we’d handle the new image management requirements for a site that is now very photo-heavy. When it came time to apply the new designs to the CMS, however, it became apparent that there was a much bigger job ahead.

That CMS (a bundle of custom PHP that I had inherited) has grown over time and within some quite onerous server configuration constraints to a point where it was due a significant overhaul. Sticking with PHP was a fixed requirement as we’re relying on various APIs and a server architecture that wouldn’t be happy with me shifting to, say, rails, but already having the problem domain mapped out and the opportunity to radically simplify a few things meant I got to enjoy the feeling of stripping out a lot of code without impairing functionality.

One note that Derek Sivers made in his controversial blog entry last year about switching from Rails to PHP was that working with Rails had made him a better PHP developer. I’ve found a similar effect. I have no intention of leaving the world of Rails (I still prefer it by orders of magnitude), but tackling projects like this in PHP are a reminder that working for a while with really good tools is likely to encourage you to seek out best practice in whatever environment you end up in.

Ruby developers who occasionally work on PHP projects as I do may be interested to note that we are using capistrano for deployment, and I intend to use rspec for some testing. I’ll try to write that up once it’s in place.

With a refreshed CMS, new templates, and some standardisation of our many javascript files on top of a jquery foundation, Paul, Greenbelt’s was able to manage the photos and copy to turn that new look into a vibrant and content-rich new site. You can see a few notes he wrote about the redesign on the site.

There’s still a fair way to go. I’ve got a lot of tests to write in order to make it easier for us to make further changes, and various aspects of the site are more than ready for a more fundamental rethink that will let the festival open up its archives better, but all concerned are very pleased to present the fruit of our labours.

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Last year I posted a few times about the aggregation code I wrote to allow Greenbelt to collect festival-related content scattered around the web and republish it. What I may not have gone into was how frustrating that code tended to be to work with, written in a rush before the festival and heavily patched while on site.

This year, with longer to prepare, I decided to throw that one away and start again. I chose python as the language again, partly because I wanted to use some python libraries and partly because it seemed time to get some more python practice in. I also decided that rather than have the parsers for each service (currently technorati, del.icio.us, flickr, pubsub, and magnolia) each update the database, it was time for some abstraction and layering.

This time around I’ve written independent extraction classes for each of the services I want to use, with each returning its data as atom entries. That atom is then fed into a ‘reasoner’ that checks whether we’ve already seen the entry, and creates or updates our store accordingly. Using atom as the intermediary made sense as much of the data is already sourced in atom (or forms that map closely to it) and the requirements for a unique ID and updated time make updates simple to manage.

It’s also ready-serialized, and so nice and portable. To test each component is working, I just have to inspect the atom code produced, which is easy to do visually or programmatically. If I wanted to spread the code across servers it’d be trivial to do so using a toolkit such as WSGI and the Atom Publishing Protocol.

With the Universal Feed Parser for parsing, and SQLObject for database abstraction, there’s a lot I don’t have to worry about.

The festival is not yet upon us, so the code has yet to be battle-tested. With over 1200 photos posted on flickr last year and a much bigger push this year, we’re expecting a lot of content. It’s good to know we have a cleanly separated, maintainable code base this time around. If it works as well as it should, I’ll try to publish the code somewhere.

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