Visualising Twitter activity – a work in progress part VI: Work to be postponed

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Done. The test at the end of last chapter was a success. An ugly hack to be sure. As long as it works. This is going to be a shorter part in the series. There are a number of different things I should do. But now I’m getting close to the interesting part. A list of stuff that can wait, because I’m impatient:

  • I really should have more exception handling. I’m communicating with the internet, and a lot of things can go wrong. During testing I got an Internal Server error from Google. I should be able to handle that, without crashing
  • Having handled that, I should be able to collect the tweets that were tweeted during the connectionproblem, and add them to the spreadsheet later.
  • I should also be able to handle getting kicked of the connection to Twitter. How to reestablish it?
  • There is a potential problem: Twitter does not guarantee that all fields will be be in all tweets. I should harden the script to be able to handle cases where there is data missing from a tweet.
  • I know what the hashtag will be. But as I’m going to leave the Raspberry Pi at home, I should be able to handle a situation, where I’m at work at 8 am, the hashtag is announced at 9am, and I have to enter the hashtag to the code, and start collecting.
  • Remember the exceptions back in part V? That exception gets thrown each and every time. Of couse the tweets are saved, but I re-authorize the connection to Google every time. Its not important enough to crash anything. But wks should be declared as a global variable. And apparently I can’t figure out how to do that correctly.

That will have to wait. Apart from the last one, that is actully somewhat critical. I’m getting close to being able to visualise some data. I’ll begin playing in a short while, but right now I think I need to spend some time on the couch.piles

 

Oh, and for those just joining the party:

Part I: The idea, and the hardware
Part II: Getting my hands on tweets
Part III: Deciding what data to save (that is going to change over the next few days)
Part IV: Storing the data
Part V: Fixing some problems