I had my first opportunity yesterday to play around with the GeoAPI geo-referencing service. Although not quite as intuitive as Google Map’s forward and reverse geocoding services, GoeAPI gives you immediate access to geo-located feeds from Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube, plus the ability to create custom neighborhoods (what they called “guids”) for you to query.

Sounds nerdy – so here’s the English translation:

You now can, with a few lines of code, get Tweets happening real-time in your neighborhood.

Fun? I guess it depends on where you live. Mostly what I’ve been finding is that my neighbors are kind of pervs.

Here’s a quick and dirty Python code sample for you to get started. You’ll need your own API key first.

Also, you’ll need to know the latitude and longitude of a point in the neighborhood you’re interested in. Try (37.766 -122.417) for the Mission. Also, because sometimes you get garbage for location data (like Where: !!!!Frisco U noe!!!!), I’ve add a quick parser to find correctly formatted latitude and longitude pairs. Plenty more you can do with this with a few minutes of time.

– Nerdy Part –

import sys, os, json, urllib, re

#usage: python get_tweets.py [lat] [lng]

lat = sys.argv[1]
lng = sys.argv[2]

# Regex to find properly formatted lat-long pairs in the where response.

lat_lng_re = re.compile('^[\D]*[^-^\d](?P[\d\.-]+)\s*\,\s*(?P[\d\.-]+).*')
api = '[YOUR API KEY]'

parent_request = 'http://api.geoapi.com/v1/parents?lat=%s&lon=%s&apikey=%s' % (lat,lng,api)
response = urllib.urlopen(parent_request).read()

json1 = json.loads(response)

# Find your neighborhood 

guid = json1['result']['parents'][0]['guid']
print "\n\nYour neighborhood: %s\n\n" % json1['result']['parents'][0]['meta']['name']
print "--TWEETS--\n\n"

# Get Tweets in your neighborhood

tweets_request = 'http://api.geoapi.com/v1/e/%s/view/twitter?apikey=%s' % (guid,api)

response = urllib.urlopen(tweets_request).read()

json2 = json.loads(response)

for tweet in json2['result']:
	print "Tweet: %s" % tweet['text']
	print "When: %s" % tweet['created_at']
	loc = lat_lng_re.match(tweet['location'])
	if loc:
		print "Lat: %s Lng: %s" % (loc.group('lat'),loc.group('lng'))
	else:
		print "Unusable location: %s" % tweet['location']
	print "User: %s" % tweet['from_user']
	print "Profile image url: %s\n" % tweet['profile_image_url']

Things worked great, and it was easy to set up the custom url with bit.ly pro by changing the A record for the domain name, however this meant that anyone going to 511cc.org directly with no hash on the end would be redirected to bit.ly’s main page. We needed this to redirect to a URL of our choosing, in this case 511contracosta.org. This isn’t an option in bit.ly pro, according to their FAQ its only available for bitly.Pro Enterprise users which costs $995/month. This was way beyond our price range.

Fortunately, its pretty easy to use .htaccess to carry out this.

• First, you need to set up the short domain name to use namesevers that point to a hosting account you control. For us, this was Media Temple so we set nameservers to ns1.mediatemple.net and ns2.mediatemple.net.
• Next, add a file called .htaccess
• The contents of the .htaccess file should be:
  

  RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/?$ http://511contracosta.org [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://bit.ly/$1 [R=301,NC]


• You should replace “http://511contracosta.org” with the domain name you’d like to redirect the root to
• Enjoy bit.ly pro, with at least one feature of bitly.pro enterprise

TechCrunch created their own “Buzz it” button and posted a link to the code in the comments. Its easy to add to any wordpress site (or really any other content management system. The following steps will show you how to add a “Buzz This” link to your site, like the one above on the BlinkTag Blog.

• Open the single.php file of your sites template. You can do this via FTP or in WordPress by going to “Appearance” -> “Editor” and selecting single.php.
• Paste the following code where you would like the Buzz It button to appear. If you are not sure where, the line right before or after <?php the_content(); ?> is a good place.

<a href="javascript:var%20b=document.body;var%20GR________bookmarklet_domain=&quot;http://www.google.com&quot;;if(b&amp;&amp;!document.xmlVersion){void(z=document.createElement(&quot;script&quot;));void(z.src=&quot;http://www.google.com/reader/ui/link-bookmarklet.js&quot;);void(b.appendChild(z));}else{}">
<img src="http://IMAGE HERE" border="0" alt="Share on Google Buzz" /> Share on Google Buzz</a>

• Replace http://IMAGE HERE with the URL of your image, or remove the image code entirely to have a text only link. If you want, take this 16×16 Buzz Logo image: but please copy it to your site, don’t link directly the image hosted on BlinkTag.
• Save the single.php file. Test it out on an individual posts page on your site.
• This same process can be in used in page.php or any other template file to add a Buzz link to your WordPress pages.

Respond in the comments if you come up with a better way to accomplish this. If you liked this post, please Buzz it!

We don’t email our list very often (once a year or less).  If anyone wants to follow us more closely than that, subscribe to this blog or follow us on twitter (@brendannee @jedhorne).

Many of our clients send out emails to their constituents/customers/subscribers/fans using a variety of platforms.  We’ve had good luck with Campaign Monitor and PHPList.  Campaign Monitor is fully hosted and costs money, but provides a slick interface, decent analytics and bounce tracking and supports custom templates and custom user fields.  PHPList is an open source application that you can host yourself.  As such, its customizable in any way you’d like and its completely free.  The interface isn’t as streamlined and intuitive as campaign monitor but it does the job.

Stop the presses! BART is now twittering. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t know that you could ride the train all the way to Black Rock City.

Virginia GOP chairman Jeff Frederick used twitter to ruin his party’s chances of luring a Democratic senator to switch parties, shifting the balance of power with this tweet:

“Big news coming out of Senate: Apparently one dem is either switching or leaving the dem caucus. Negotiations for power sharing underway.”

Meanwhile, New York Republican Jim Tedisco used twitter to pull in nasty comments from his opposition directly to his website in real time. Tweets like:

“Will Tedisco Finally Reimburse Taxpayers Over $21,000 For His 20-Minute Car Ride?”

made it on his site.

Moral? Don’t use twitter to discuss secret negotiations and avoid publishing unfiltered tweets on your website if you have people that don’t like you.

[Thanks to Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo for spotting these gems.]