Real artists ship.
Steve Jobs

It doesn’t matter how long you’ve spent working on something, or how clever you’ve been with the design or development if it’s sitting on a folder on your computer rather than in the hands of real people. I swore to myself that the next idea I had for a side project, I’d actually get off my ass and do it, however long it took with the little spare time I have, and I’d get it shipped as quickly as possible. (Shipping an imperfect, unfinished product isn’t quite what Steve meant, but hey…)

The idea

Every now and again on my Twitter stream, one of the people I follow gets a games console and their friends reply back with their gamer handles so that they can connect on these systems and perhaps play online. I also send out my XBox Live gamertag every now and then to see if any of the people I follow also play the same kind of games as me so that if we’re ever online at the same time, I can jump into a game with them and play with some familiar faces. It gets wearing to constantly ask your twitter followers for their handles, so I figured I could build something to do this for us.

Idea for a side project, Twitter app where you add your Xbox/PS3/PC gamer ID’s and see the ID’s of the people you follow.

— Stanton (@stanton) January 6, 2012

After sending this tweet I had quite a few replies from interested parties, so as Richard Branson would say, I thought ‘Screw it, Let’s do it” and got to work. Knowing that my time was limited I decided to develop this rapidly, to a minimum feature set, and with little to no design work more than a basic wireframe. The idea was to get it in people’s hands as quickly as possible; If it takes off I’ll devote more time to it, if not then I’ve not wasted months of work.

Minimum Viable Product

• User Add/Edit/Sign in
• Twitter oAuth
• XBL & PSN handles
• Add/Remove handles
• List handles of Twitter friends
• Ask user to post link to their friends

After scribbling down the ‘Minimum Viable Product’ feature set, I grabbed the latest version of CakePHP and 320 and up and got to work integrating with Twitter, I had to modify the OAuth Consumer component for the latest version of Cake, but with the magic of GitHub I was able to push these changes back to the original author to be integrated into future versions. Within a few days I had a working prototype which I took to the New Adventures conference to get some feedback on while chatting with people at at the pre-party.

One of the hardest things was making the conscious effort not to spend too much time on the design, It’s ingrained in our industry and culture to put the design of a new product under the microscope and make snap judgements on the quality of a service based on it’s pixels but with the constraints I’d placed upon the project, design would have to come later so I threw some very simple colour and layout over the top to at least make it palatable for the users. and after a few evenings of steady coding I checked out the code onto the production server and threw the link onto Twitter.

twig.gr

So twig.gr went live, and now we play the waiting game and to see how it goes, I’m quite happy for it to grow slowly and organically especially since I don’t have the means to conduct any kind of social media/marketing campaign for it, I think it’s one of those kinds of products that works truly by word of mouth. If you add yourself, you’re likely to tell others to sign up so that you can find them also. If it grows in popularity then I’ll devote more time to it both from a feature and design point of view, if not, then at least I shipped!

The cakephp_2.0-dev branch was throwing the following error for me when trying to use the Twitter OAuth API.

The relevant changes are available in my cakephp_2.0.5 branch on Github.

Changelog

• Rename directories to match new conventions.
• Change createConsumer method to use $className rather than $fileName to fix ‘Consumer twitter_consumer.php not found!’ exception.
• Use App::uses instead of App::import to fix ‘Fatal error: Class ‘HttpSocket’ not found…’ error.

Get the code

https://github.com/Stanton/oauth-consumer-component/tree/cakephp_2.0.5

The Cake paginator helper works fine if you’re using basic anchor links to trigger sort options, but I wanted to use a dropdown select element so that the user can choose how to order the moblogs.

So I know this is most likely a horrible solution to the problem and certainly not very ‘cakey’, but it’s quick, dirty, and it works for what I need it to do.

In the view we need a valid form element, even though the javascript hijacks the onChange event and doesn’t actually post the result. At the moment this does mean that this doesn’t work without javascript but I plan on improving this soon by only using $paginator->sort links in the view, and replacing them with the form completely in javascript.

in the view:

In the jQuery we take whichever value was selected on change, build the relevant ‘paginator compatible’ url which the helper will use to return the required data on page load and then redirect the browser.

jQuery:

In this particular example, I’m using a random order also, which needs to be an ‘order’ param instead of a ‘sort’, so in the controller I’m checking which params are being used, and setting a consistant order variable which is used in the view to maintain the selected state of the select element.

in the index method in the controller

If any Cake ninjas are reading this and have any suggestions, or better methods, please do leave a comment!