Enable users to follow custom lists

[lovehandle]

More of a question than an issue, but would there be value in adding an input for following lists not hard-coded into the application?

[sferik]

This is how I originally designed the app until @ryanatwork changed it. 😉

See 617c18c.

[sferik]

Also, I'm not particularly happy with this code (which I wrote): https://github.com/codeforamerica/follow-all/blob/master/app/helpers/sessions_helper.rb

I'm now thinking it should use the Twitter.lists method. The downside is, it requires an extra synchronous Twitter API call but, on the upside, I think it makes the code more dynamic.

[lovehandle]

If we use a text field (in lieu of a select box) for the user selection, we could use the Twitter.lists method to dynamically pull every list the user has.

I'm in favor of opening up the lists a user can follow via follow-all.

[ryanatwork]

Oh right I changed that.. how about both? A dropdown and a textbox for custom lists.

[sferik]

Maybe something like this? http://jsfiddle.net/EMEVL/

[GovInTrenches]

I'm working on a project that's like a start-up kit for communities new to civic hacking and I wanted to fork this repo so I could allow a list of all the civic hacker accounts. (A long list to be sure, but would really be handy for new people - I could cut it down too) However, if this repo was going to allow custom lists we may be able to work it out that way. I would just need to find a way to ensure my users say my list first.

[sferik]

@rclosner Any plans to add this?

[bensheldon]

@GovInTrenches it's really simple to just rip out the whole Twitter.list following functionality and just feed it an array of Twitter usernames to loop over and subscribe to. Basically replace this block in the User model with an array of usernames (fetched from anywhere... like a yaml file or an external json resource, for example). Then just rip out the form stuff in the template and the controller. Voila.

[lovehandle]

@sferik Did this already. I haven't made a pull request because I wanted to add tests. Lost momentum, but hoping to wrap up sometime this week? (Fingers Crossed)

[ondrae]

Got a request today from the Brigade for this feature.

[drewrwilson]

Hey @codesliced and I made a version of follow-all for TransparencyCamp's attendees list. We had to do some finagling to address rate limiting, but it seems to be working now. To address the rate limiting, we just made it sleep for a little while then retry.

Here's our forked repo: https://github.com/drewrwilson/follow-all

EDIT: Thanks @sferik for all the advice and help via twitter and stuff!

[sferik]

@drewrwilson That won’t work: https://twitter.com/sferik/status/472440682318417920.