5th
@oo5 overhaul is live and kicking
I tentatively pushed a complete update to the @oo5 machinery a few weeks ago. I’ve been quietly keeping an eye on things to check that everything’s working and, much to my surprise, all seems good. This update was mostly for my benefit. @oo5 was my first go at programming in about 7 years and I made a lot of mistakes. Some of the machinery was impossible to maintain or improve and I’d coded myself into a corner.
So I went back and started again.
For the technically minded: the back end is now based on Merb instead of Rails. I absolutely loved the experience of coding on Merb - the documentation is sparse but the API is guessable enough to make up for that.
This release does have a few notable feature improvements too though.
Direct messages are now supported across the board. If you don’t want to annoy your followers with a barrage of reviews you can swap the @oo5 part of your tweet for d oo5. Here’s an example:
d oo5 Che: Part One 3.5 For an ignorant person like myself, educational, engaging, realistic & insipiring to see the revolution beginning.
The design has been tidied up a tiny bit, pushing the movie posters, album covers and gig photos that first showed up on the home page down into the rest of the site.
Lastly, I put a bit of time into standardising the API for getting data out. You can now get RSS, XML and JSON for anything that deals with reviews. Take a look at the examples on the syndication page if you’re interested.
