Samuel Chandra

Twitter Timeline and Facebook Pages Feed Aggregator with Ruby

Wednesday, 7th March 2012

A Common feature that was asked by clients is to display their Twitter and Facebook posts in a nice UI inside their iOS App.

You could do this using ObjC in the app OR use a server side component to aggregate them first and sort them by time in descending order. Latest on top.

I think doing it in ObjC is a lot of work. You can use MGTwitterEngine and Facebook Connect APIs to get the feed, place them in a Feed Object and sort them.

So I choose the simpler way through a ruby script that is run from a cronjob to aggregate them as JSON which will be consumed by the app

Here is the code:

We can cache the result and the iOS app will not take a long time to fetch the data. Great