A museum piece that still works In March 2007, I was doing a lot of experimenting with Twitter and news. I wanted to see how they fit together. So I hooked up the flow of the NYT to a Twitter channel. It was great! 3/16/2007: Because Twitter has a public API that allows anyone to add a feature, and because the NY Times offers its content as a set of feeds, I was able to whip up a connection between the two in a few hours. Thats the power of open APIs. It kept updating through 2010, when it stopped. I dont know exactly why, but I always wanted to get it going again, and finally it is. twitter/nyt Today Im using River4 running on Heroku, with a tiny node.js app running on a spare machine in my Manhattan apartment, a short distance from NYT headquarters. It bridges the NYT content flow with Twitters servers. Its nice the way small and big systems fit together, still -- in 2014, as they did in 2007. Some things dont change, and thats good! All youll ever see in this stream are links to stories on the NYT website. I hope they dont mind, this is kind of a museum piece, and its nice to have it running once again! PS: Its also a loop back to the beginnings of RSS, which were made possible by the Times, thanks to the trust Martin Nisenholtz had in us. Once again, another dividend of collaborative development. PPS: Technology breaks, its a reality. This application is only seven years old, and it was broken when I came across it yesterday. It feels good to get it working again.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 17:00:24 +0000