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Coda Hale lives in Berkeley, CA, where he writes about Ruby on Rails, usability, web design and development, and the occasional bit about bicycles.

sfearthquakes = Twitter + Earthquakes

So, we’ve had some earthquakes in the SF Bay Area recently. Nothing big, but certainly big enough to prompt hundreds of Twitter users to chip in about the last earthquake.

So what did I do?

I went and wrote a Twitter bot to scrape the USGS website and post the results to Twitter.

Voila: sfearthquakes.

The best part? It’s hosted in Texas, so when the big one hits, it’ll still be able to chip in.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 1:44am and is filed under Programming, Ruby and Rails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2nd Mar 2007 1:44am Programming Ruby and Rails
 

8 Responses to “sfearthquakes = Twitter + Earthquakes”

  1. Brad Says:
    March 2nd, 2007 at 12:54pm

    Except Twitter appears to be hosted in Oakland, so when the big one hits, no one will hear you scream.

  2. Coda Says:
    March 2nd, 2007 at 12:55pm

    I’ll get an email about a failed cron job.

  3. JohnB Says:
    March 5th, 2007 at 12:02pm

    Can you filter out quakes under a 3.0? Unless its directly under you, most people don’t notice a 2.9.

    Thanks for doing this - I definitely felt the 4.2 last week - I was in the middle of Zellerbach Hall at Berkeley.

  4. Coda Says:
    March 5th, 2007 at 1:26pm

    JohnB: I’ve upped the tolerance to 2.9 or greater. The endless tweets about microscopic quakes got old, quick. ;-)

  5. Breakfast Links: Orkut, Earthquakes and Wierd Statues | #comments Says:
    March 13th, 2007 at 3:47am

    [...] Fortunately, for those of you living in San Francisco where this is your daily fear, you can now twitter the latest earthquake news! Good [...]

  6. Don Park Says:
    March 24th, 2007 at 11:50am

    this is awesome! could you create an ‘laearthquakes’ as well?

  7. Trisignia Says:
    April 17th, 2007 at 10:02am

    Twitter and the Virginia Tech Emergency…

    School shootings are always shocking in their suddenness and their brutality, and the one yesterday morning at Virginia Tech is no different. According to news reports, 32 people and the gunmen were killed in the attack, making it one of the worst in…

  8. TuttleTree.com » Do you have stairs in your house? Says:
    June 26th, 2007 at 7:57am

    [...] This is pretty awesome. If you’re a dork. I don’t use Twitter - I barely update my status on Facebook - but if you’re the type of person who constantly feels the need to write “I’m icing cupcakes, but I have to pee…” then Twitter is the place for you. [...]