Tom Morris

A while back I thought it would be a neat idea to have Tube status information delivered over Twitter. That way people who have the dubious honour of using the most expensive metropolitan transit system in the world can keep track of what's wrong with it.

And I then put it on the back burner.

Today I found out the best way of doing it, built it in the space of half an hour (in true bloggers' style, while in my pyjamas).

And I can now announce it here.

Every fifteen minutes, my server will check the Tube status and send any delays to the relevant Twitter accounts. You can then quite easily subscribe to individual Tube lines and get updates via whatever means you deem appropriate as you would as a Twitter user.

A neat side effect of this is that there is now Atom and RSS feeds for each Tube line which you can subscribe to and get these updates sent directly to your RSS reader too. Twitter can also serve as a historical home for Tube problems from now on.

This is real Tube 2.0 stuff.

Bakerloo: tubebakerloo (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

Circle: tubecircle (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

Central: tubecentral (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

District: tubedistrict (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

East London: tubeeastlon (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

Hammersmith and City: tubehcity (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

Jubilee: tubejubilee (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

Metropolitan: tubemetro (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

Northern: tubenorthern (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

Piccadilly: tubepiccadil (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

Victoria: tubevictoria (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

Waterloo and City: tubewcity (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

How to use: Sign up for an accont with Twitter. Once you are logged in, go to the Tube line profile that you want to add and choose "add" in the right hand menu. Check the delivery settings on your Twitter homepage to make sure that status updates are delivered through the right medium (over the web, over IM or over SMS).

How to use (LiveJournal): There are now LiveJournal feeds for each tube line - just click on the ones you want and click 'add friend'.

I can't promise it'll always work. And I'm sure there'll be a few little bugs which might appear over the next few days. Things like planned closures (the W&C line doesn't run at weekends, and I may need to tweak the script in order to not tell you that). If you get updates which you don't want, I apologise in advance and I'll try to make sure that such annoyances are kept to the minimum.

Since I'm both a user and developer, if it's annoying, it will annoy me too.

If Twitter extend their API, I will be offering some new functionality soonish. Talk to me in person for long enough and you'll find out what it is.

And remember - if your Tube train gets delayed, don't get mad, get a Customer Charter complaints form from your local Tube station, fill it in and get a free Tube journey in return.

Update: I've put together a similar service for the San Francisco BART. The username is bartsf.

Tags: tube, london, twitter

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Mike Arrington thinks the BBC ought to be dissolved because it's stifling innovation.

Based on what - the Office not being shown in the US, the TVLA and a new social network being produced for the target audience of CBBC.

WTF? If startup innovation - the "four or five startups" that Arrington mentions - is being prevented because of a CBBC social network, then we really are in a bad situation. The idea that there are VCs out there who would fund a rather dull social network for kids if only the BBC weren't competing is just... laughable.

The fact is that in the United States, the technology behind startups is valued higher than here, where the actual market revenue is weighted higher in valuation. This reflects a much more risk-averse society. Google would never be built in the UK, because Google doesn't let Dixons or Boots push more widgets. The investors here would be the guys betting the family farm on Lycos or Excite or any of the companies which have basically disappeared because they didn't focus on building good technology and got "portalitis" instead (as now we have MySpace imitation syndrome).

Excuse me while I find the upgrade disc so that I can start surfing Web 6.0 where evil CBBC presenters fearlessly destroy startup opportunities at every turn. I bet they didn't know that was in the job description.

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I think I've got almost the most perfect JavaScript building envrionment possible. I'm using Aptana as a plug-in for Eclipse to write my JavaScript, and using Firebug to debug it. This setup absolutely rules. What's nice about Eclipse is that it enables me to hack quicker (and not have to care about files and folders - just boot up Eclipse, hit "new (whatever) file" and then do local development really quickly. When doing back-end stuff, it's even nicer because it tends to make one do bigger things - orient oneself towards objects, develop more generic classes etc.

So Eclipse - and IDEs in general - get a big thumbs up from me. Especially Code Assist - or, as Simon Harriyott tells me, IntelliSense for you Visual Studio folks.

Following the discussion from yesterday, I asked Andy Budd on the train about the "dc\:title" class name idea for using RDFa. He seemed sceptical that it'd actually work. It works in Firefox, but it's likely not to work in some browsers and could have all sorts of undesirable and unpredictable side-effects. It also looks appalling, and is not a good way to endear web designers to the cause of semantics.

The final thing is Twitter hacking. For those who've been following along today with the Twitter Tube Tracker, you may have found the updates rather sporadic. That's because they're not happening regularly yet. I haven't turned on automatic updates. I'm doing all the updates manually at the moment, so as to ensure that they are all actually working. This is to prevent mass spammage of people. Hopefully, if we make it through the night without too many problems, I shall then set the crontab up tomorrow and we'll start getting pings going through automatically. I must say, it has been enlightening to see how utterly rubbish the Tube can be.

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Jeremy Keith's new book, Bulletproof Ajax, is finished according to Jeremy's Twitter. I'm just getting around to teaching myself JavaScript properly - mostly using Jeremy's first book and Christian Heilmann's book.

As a humorous aside and an introduction to the writing of Denmark's (only) great philsopher, Søren Kierkegaard (or rather, his satirical pen-name Johannes Climacus), I present a little quote that may illustrate the situation of this somewhat hapless reader:

An author publishes a big book; it has scarecly been out a week before he falls into conversation with a reader. The reader asks politely, sympathetically, and in a very glow of longing, if he does not soon intend to write another book. The author is enchanted: to think of having a reader who so quickly works his way through a big book, and in spite of the labor and the toil preserves his zest undimmed! Alas for the poor deluded author! In the further course of the conversation, the benevolently interested reader, the same who so longingly awaits the new book, admits that he has not read the published book, and that he will probably never find the time to do so.

-- Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Introduction, p. 13

Talking of satirical pen-names, I was reading an old thing from Scripting News a few days ago when I came across an entry where Dave said that when he first started putting italics at the end of his posts, he'd get e-mails from people concerned that someone had hacked in and was adding snarky comments to his blog, only for him to explain that it was alternative Dave. Nobody knows where Mr. Italics comes from. It wasn't a technical fault, but it was a different person.

I wrote up a seriously snarky blog entry earlier and trashed it. Oh, if you guys could read it. Alas, it has gone to the bit bucket. Just writing it made me feel better. Certain actions will be taken to remedy the situation that caused me to write it, but I'm biting my tongue. I'm self-censoring. I'm not sure whether that's a good or bad thing.

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