It goes without saying that there is TONS of data on Twitter, luckily there is a nice API to be able to read some of that data. There are a good number of apps annd sites that are using this data and making some great services that help with analyzing, sorting, and parsing content from other social networks. So I wanted to take a quick look at what it takes to read some data from the Twitter API from Ruby and write a little fun code that also does some Geolocation based on your friends location they enter on Twitter.

Hopping around from languages to languages, its easy to forget how to do something, nothing that a quick Google search can’t help with but I wanted to make this posting for myself to save some time. MD5 is used all over the place, its a one way hash that can be used for checking the integrity of files, storing passwords in databases and checking text being passed around. I do want to add a note here about using MD5 hashes for storing passwords in a database, I would start by looking at SHA-1 along with using salt this will help ensure if anyone gets a hold of your database they can just use rainbow table to workout the plain text of the password.

A bit ago at work I was asked to help a customer with a solution for using the Lyris ListManager’s SOAP API with just HTTP Post calls. They just needed to see some sample code that they could use to re-write. SOAP is XML based, you send and get back XML. Just using HTTP Post you need to format the XML you are sending and then parse out the information you get back from the SOAP server.

Update: New code using Battle.net’s REST API can be found here. For the people that play World of Warcraft, you know there is a great site made by Blizzard that keeps all your characters and guild information called the armory. If you take a good look at the site you will see its XML being formatted by XSLT. This is really great for people that want to script something to pull data from the armory because XML is really easy to parse.