Twitversation: how much do you converse on Twitter?

You know what I said a few days ago?

I’d love to have stats on this to make myself more accountable, but I wasn’t able to find an easy way to show my Twitter usage (new tweets vs replys vs retweets)–does anyone know one?

Well, I didn’t find anything and thought it’d be fun to learn some of the Twitter API, a bit of Django, Bootstrap, and how to host something on Heroku.  So, I wrote an app, Twitversation, which gives you a rough approximation of how much you converse on Twitter, as opposed to broadcasting.  You can enter your Twitter username and it presents a breakdown graph and a numeric score (I’m 60 out of 100, whereas patio11 scores 78 and Gary V scores a hefty 83.

Twitversation only pulls the last 200 tweets, so it’s not canonical, but it should be enough to give you a flavor.  Sarah Allen has a post up about her score.

What’d I learn?  Among other things:

• Heroku is super easy to get started on. And it’s free!  Perfect for your MVP.
• Django has an unfortunate term for the C in the MVC (they call it a view).
• You can create a pie graph using only CSS and HTML.
• Side projects take longer than you think.
• Picking a side project that doesn’t require any feeding is liberating.  Twitversation will keep running without any attention on my part, as opposed to my other side project.
• Python’s dependency management is a bear for a newbie.  I didn’t have to do much with this project, because it had its own vagrant vm, but I saw some of the complexity out of the corner of my eye.  Makes me long for the JVM and classpaths, and I never thought I’d say that.
• Catchy names are hard to come up with.

Hope you enjoy!