twitMate

Today was productive. I managed to build these two pages start to finish in a short time, including edit profile, change password and view subscription details.

That's the dashboard complete for twitMate!

I resisted the urge to go live on Friday afternoon just before taking the weekend off :)

This is the page where you can view, edit and delete scheduled tweets before they are posted to Twitter.

The idea is that even though the work preparing and scheduling the tweets is done for you, you still might want to check tweets or change them before they go live.

It was a quicker job than I expected, largely because the front end development had already been completed for the demo page which you can see at twitmate.com

4) logged out

3) Logged in

2) Settings Menu

This evening I competed the user menu for the user interface.

Here's a sneak preview:
1) User Menu

Specifically, development of the top-menu so it changes when the user is logged in and displays their name and some icons (which will open menus).

UI development can feel a little slow but if I do it right I should only have to do it once :)

This should have been straightforward but the loss of WIFI half way through added unexpected difficulties. Luckily I had an old ethernet cable lying around which saved the day.

I tend to roll my own login system for each webapp that I build, although by now I've done this so often that I have the codebase ready and it's mostly copy-paste-test, with more work on the frontend than the backend.

For this one I used a newer hashing method - this added a little to the job but was worth it because it should stand the test of time.

Quick improvement of this before going live

This was the last job on the sandbox/demo (finally!) and I am hoping to go live tomorrow :)

This evening I made a couple of finishing touches to the sandbox:

1) making sure any error messages disappeared when a modal is closed
2) a reset button which clears the changes the user has made in the sandbox and allows them to start again

Nearly there - just responsiveness of the input modals to go!

Last night I finished off the server side validation for user inputs, with validation of hashtags and image selection completed.

Hashtags must begin with a #, are alphanumeric and are less than 50 characters.

The image filename must match one of the images in our selection.

I completed this for several types of user inputs today: text for tweets (max length for tweet), time of tweet (hh:mm), tweet id.

I also serve a prompt when validation is failed: e.g. "tweet_text must be under 250 characters" and tinkered with the UX for this as I wanted it to appear alongside the modal where the user filled the form while also keeping the text they input to save them having to type it out again in full.

After two months of running the audience management engine but tweeting manually I'm happy with this.

The only reason for manual tweeting is that I don't have much evergreen content for twitMate yet - once it's in place I will post tweets via the tweet engine.

This is for the sandbox in the demo page.

twitMate schedules all tweets automatically but I want users to retain control. To achieve this the user can view a feed of upcoming tweets and change them.

To show off the functionality I'm building a sandbox which visitors can play with on a demo page.

One aspect is rescheduling tweets for a different time - which is the job that's done now :)

The Big Toe scheduled Tweets are going to make up the demo feed on the twitMate website so I doubled down and optimised all the images, not just for Twitter but for the website too.

The idea is that even though twitMate will automatically schedule tweets a month in advance users will get the option to view, edit and delete these before they are posted to Twitter.

The demo page will be a sandbox to show off thus functionality to anyone visiting the site

Just viewing complete for now - next up editing