Introducing “We Rate Tweets” — a Glitch App for Searching Your Twitter Timeline

Glitch, the latest project by creators of Trello, FogBugz and co-creators of Stack Overflow, is a new platform for building web applications that features online code editing and instant deployment. In this post, you’ll learn how to use Glitch to host and remix an Algolia-powered search for your tweets.

Want to try it out right now? Try searching through Algolia’s most popular tweets or read the documentation to learn how to create and customize your own copy.

What is Glitch?

Glitch was created out of a desire to make code more accessible to people across the board and give companies that make developer tools a fast route for users to start building on top of their product.

“A key goal of Glitch is to make development more accessible. We’re building Glitch as much for new starters, and those with just a little or rusty programming knowledge, as we are for full-time, professional developers.”- Gareth Wilson

The thing we dig about Glitch is the power it puts into the user’s hand to get going fast on a variety of projects ranging from a sample API call to a robust web application or blog. By allowing users to raise their hand when they need help, Glitch is making it easier for new coders to get up and running. It is helping knit communities together with building blocks for coding.

There is a plethora of getting-started applications that allow you to do something called Remix, which will create a copy of the codebase on your own profile to work with. This allows you to take your idea even further after some of the foundation has been laid for you.

Jenn Schiffer, community engineer at Glitch, affectionately talks about the platform as

“the friendly community where you’ll build the app of your dreams”

Algolia is one of the early adopters of Glitch alongside Twilio, Facebook, Trello, and the Slack API. Visit Algolia’s home on Glitch – glitch.com/algolia – to see more apps that use the API and learn more about search.

Introducing We Rate Tweets

Inspired by one of DevRel team’s favorite Twitter accounts, Dog Rates, we created We Rate Tweets to scratch our own itch of wanting a faster tweet search with a way to classify and rate our tweets by their popularity. Ratings are on a scale of 1-10, or more than 10 in special circumstances. 😉

Once you have connected your Twitter account, you can start searching your own timeline. We will have already indexed your tweets and assigned a rating score with each one. That way, rather than seeing your search results in a chronological order, you see your most retweeted and liked tweets first.

If you recognize that you talk a lot about a subject – selfies with your dog, live-tweeting at a conference, hitting up some sweet yoga class or drinking wine while doing any of those — you may want to search on keywords you use in tweets, like dogs, JavaScript, wine, or yoga. From there you can see your tweets that match those words, and even share those exact search results via the page’s updated URL.

Just using the app doesn’t require any coding skills on your part. Just login with your Twitter account and you’ll be able to search back through your last few hundred tweets.

Remix to get your own live copy

Want to index even more tweets and index tweets of other users? You can do this very easily with the “Remix” feature on Glitch. This will create a copy of We Rate Tweets onto your Glitch profile. From there, you can:

• Customize the look and feel, including the emojis used for rating
• Add more calls to the Twitter API to get a larger history; the world is your oyster!

You’ll need a Twitter account and an Algolia account first. Instructions for creating those and everything else are in the README on Glitch.

We love hearing from you ?

Reach out to us on Twitter and tell us what you think, or join our online community on Discourse and share what you’ve done with your remix. Happy searching and Glitch-ing!