Posted on: November 17, 2009 in Miscellany, Coding
Small pieces loosely joined - to a ski hill
I’ve always been a fan of the “small pieces loosely joined” approach to building simple web apps. A little bit of something from here, hook it up to there, and voilà! Sometimes something useful can spring into existence.
With the coming ski season (which I’m really excited about) I was spending some time on the Whistler Blackcomb website checking out the conditions, and I happened to notice a few public data feeds. One of these feeds contains the status of all the lifts on Whistler and Blackcomb, so of course, I had to hook it up to Twitter. The WhistlerBot updates its twitter stream every time a lifts status changes, and from my visit to the ski hill last weekend, it seems to do so in pretty close to real time.
When I was on the hill, I turned on mobile notifications for just this account (so I don’t get distracted with other Twitter noise) and now my pocket will vibrate whenever the Peak chair changes from standby to open, for example. No one likes to ski in a tracked out bowl, right?…
While I was at it, I also threw up the slightly hilarious, but still useful isthepeakopen.com and gave the WhistlerBot its own home.
Hope other folks find these useful too.