Trevor May.ca

I’ve been working hard on Politwitter this past week, adding many new exciting features along with several bug fixes.

I just finished adding a new statistics page that tracks the sentiment of tweets mentioning MPs. The results are grouped by party and interesting charts are shown.
http://politwitter.ca/page/sentiment

I created a page listing all the Twitter hashtags for House of Commons committees and will now index all tweets using these hashtags.
http://politwitter.ca/page/committees

I created a list of all 308 federal ridings http://politwitter.ca/riding
You can click on any riding to view that ridings social media page, showing all related content for that riding.

I also started a federal riding hashtag format based on the riding EDID number for people to tag their tweets about local riding issues. To help people find your EDID hashtag I created this lookup tool http://politwitter.ca/page/edid_lookup

I remade the main menu using a multi-column dropdown format, allowing for much more links in a user friendly format.

I created a system to collect the total number of tweets each parties MPs make each week then to automatically tweet out those stats for each party using 4 Twitter accounts I have for each party. So people can follow which ever twitter account they are interested in. The stats can also be viewed on this page: http://politwitter.ca/page/statistics_weekly

I remade the “election fever” page updated for 2011 and switched the charts to use the new interactive Google visualization.
http://politwitter.ca/page/election_fever

I did some major backend work to allow the site to start tracking MPs & MLAs that are not on Twitter but do have other social networks. Previously everything was tied to a twitter username, so I wasn’t able to add MPs without Twitter.

Along with that I started creating new directory pages to list the politicians on other social networks than Twitter
Facebook: http://politwitter.ca/directory/facebook
Youtube: http://politwitter.ca/directory/youtube/mp/house

Also related are the new ‘profile overview’ pages for tracked users, which give a summary of all their social media content indexed by Politwitter. Example: http://politwitter.ca/profile/joycemurray
I’ve also added ‘Klout’ score to all MPs profiles.

I started populating the stats page on MPs profiles, here is an example: http://politwitter.ca/page/userstats/user/MinJK

There is now a “Bills & Votes” landing page http://politwitter.ca/page/bills and I’m working on indexing all tweets relating to any bill in parliament, then listing all the bills with related tweets.

The MP & Riding search was also improved. You can enter an MP or MLAs name, riding name or a postal code and get a list of MPs and ridings that match.
Example: http://politwitter.ca/mp_search.php?search_mp=Peter

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And finally I added a new blog post asking for Donations to help fund the continuing development, upkeep and hosting of Politwitter.ca

Read the post here: http://politwitter.ca/blog/14/call-for-donations
Donate here: http://politwitter.ca/page/donate

I’m excited to announce a new project I’ve been working on, http://webcomictweets.com/ a social media aggregator & directory for webcomics. Webcomictweets allows you to follow all webcomicers in one convenient location. The site brings in content from Twitter, facebook, formspring, pictures, ustream, youtube, tumblr, deviantart and more!

Webcomictweets offers a loads of functionality, with features like conversations, tweeting from the site, a follow and “like” system and much more.

The site provides many statistics of webcomics and their Twitter & social media usage. With features like rankings, popularity, influence, social media scorecard and more. The site also tracks the content that receives the most views, likes, retweets and so on, allowing visitors to view the most popular content.

There are too many features to talk about in a single post. If you’re interested visit the site & start exploring or watch the horribly narrated introduction video here.

I was trying to remember the other day how many rides I went on last year and I couldn’t remember. So for this year I decided to create a ride log and I’ve made it as a Facebook application that anyone can use.

Its very simple at the moment, which is not a bad thing, I don’t want to clutter it up. But I do have plans for more features if people actualy start using it!?

Basically all the app allows you to do now is enter in a database each ride you go on. With fields like location, trails you rode and friends you rode with. The app is integrated with facebooks friends system and has an option to post a message to your wall when you add a ride.

You can try it out here: http://apps.facebook.com/ridelog/

Screenshot:

Future features:
- Profile tab
- Profile box showing latest rides added
- upload images
- stats page showing most popular locations, trails, top riders and so on
- location & trail names clickable
- global page to view everyones ridelogs (if public)

If you have any suggestions please let me know!

For some random reason I decided to totally re-make my personal site. I changed the focus from being a portfolio site to more of a personal blog site. I decided to give WordPress a whirl since I had recently written a plugin for a friend. I spent the all of yesterday trying out various plugins, fiddling with code and creating a theme.

I am very impressed with how good wordpress has become, its way better than it was 3 years ago when i last tried it. The plug-and-play plugin system is awesome and there are so many great plugins available for free. The admin control panel is also now so much nicer as of version 2.7.I was also able to import all my old blog posts using the RSS import method. I am going to try and actual update the blog now!

Some features of the new site include.

• Integration with twitter
• blog posts create a  tweet
• Facebook photos viewable from this site
• ‘Facebook Connect’ visitors are able to login to this site using there facebook login. This makes logging in to comment super easy and fast!
• Livestream feed
• Tagging and search highlights, auto-tagging
• tabbed widgets
• Threaded comments with comment notification option
• Mobile versions of this site for Windows mobile and iPhone

I am testing the plugin feature to add photos from my facebook to blog posts.

BloggingTories.com claims its forums are the 'fastest growing political forums in Canada', but the data shows otherwise. In fact it's a major stretch of a claim for them to make considering their growth rate is among the lowest.

The data says otherwise:

and here is the growth rate compared:

After spending a fair amount of time adding loads of new designs and making my new shop site I am finaly starting to make some sales on this new system. Just sold my 50th shirt since start of march.

Check out my new shop with tons of Canada themed designs but not limited to that! I have some very neat designs from a friend in the Canadian armed forced as well some from spikecomix. http://shop.canadaka.net