Phoenix Mars Lander on Twitter

goobermaster — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:37:10 -0500

It's already old news that the Phoenix Mars Lander landed on Mars back on May 28th. But did you know it's communicating via Twitter? How incredibly clever! I love how it "talks" in first person. :) Follow MarsPhoenix on Twitter yourself. A few of my favs:

MarsPhoenix Here's a great picture of my deployed arm with the scoop on the end: http://tinyurl.com/3s354p I can't wait to dig in the dirt next week. 10:14 PM May 29, 2008

MarsPhoenix Looking forward to an exciting day on Mars; My first dig in the dirt! Team calls this a "dig and dump" test of my robotic arm and scoop. 09:05 AM June 01, 2008

MarsPhoenix @charmcitygavin TEGA "cooks" soil samples until they emit gasses that I can "sniff" to learn what they are. I just hope they smell good :) 04:12 PM June 03, 2008

MarsPhoenix I'm learning new tricks! Sprinkle practice went great, see www.nasa.gov/phoenix Used small motor on back of scoop to shake and break soil. 10:37 AM June 10, 2008

Twitter updated with Facebook and Aggregating on Goobertech

goobermaster — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:42:27 -0500

Got all that? It took a fair amount of effort to make it all come together. My Live Twitter Feed If you're uninformed, Twitter is a social networking site with the sole purpose of creating a list of status updates (like Facebook), or maybe some of you are still stuck with Myspace's version. Anyway -- the potential for niftiness with Twitter exceeds all and so I've begun my plunge into its depths. Here are the steps I took:

After creating my Twitter account, I themed the page accordingly.
I downloaded Twitterbook 2 and followed the directions to make my Facebook status automagically update my Twitter status. (Too bad that script doesn't work in reverse. If I update Twitter -- via phone, for example -- it won't update Facebook.)
I created a new cron link on my site to run every fifteen minutes which will run the script to check Facebook and update Twitter.
Added the Aggregation module to my Drupal install and set it up.
Created the drupal-view that's linked above and voila! Live Twitter feeds on Goobertech via RSS.

The really neato part of this is that the aggregation module actually turns the feed into nodes, so comments and archiving are done the same way everything else is. Check in again, I'll be tweaking the style of the Feed page for awhile me thinks.

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Phoenix Mars Lander on Twitter

Twitter updated with Facebook and Aggregating on Goobertech