Orbiting Links

I’ve added a new section to Orbiting Frog today: Orbiting Links (http://links.orbitingfrog.com). This new page displays an automated set of URLs currently being shared by the astronomers of Twitter. This is a work in progress, but it seems to be producing good results so far.

Orbiting Links is created by taking a small set of my favourite astro-Tweeters, and following their tweets, and the tweets of the people they follow too. As links are shared, I store them and keep track of how often they are retweeted or posted elsewhere. Those that rise to the top in any 24-hour period are displayed on the page. Each URL that makes it to this page has some details attached to it, including the original tweet that the system spotted it in.

I’m tracking a bunch of my favourite go-to astronomers on Twitter. The accounts they follow are also monitored, up to about 5,000 accounts. It isn’t necessarily those people that will rise to the top here though – but more likely the sources of the links they share. I will continuously modify the list of source accounts, to maximise the usefulness of this page.

Why Do This?

To find interesting stuff! The topics will vary day-to-day, and sources of interesting links should rise to the top organically. I see this as an alternative news source, delivering material aligned with the interests of my peers on Twitter. It’s an experiment too – and a coding project I’ve been wanting to build for a while now. The source code is on GitHub, forked from the original OpenFuego repo.

Resources Used

This site has built on top of several other projects, many of which I have slightly modified. The back-end is written in PHP and the front-end is HTML+JavaScript.

• OpenFuego: Created by Andrew Phelps of the Nieman Journalism Lab, OpenFuego is the open-source version of Fuego, a Twitter bot created to track the future-of-journalism crowd and the links they’re sharing.
• Type & Grids: You can find many amazing website templates on Type & Grids. All of them are responsive and well-commented, and many of them are free.
• Twitter: Microblogging site Twitter is still one of my favourite things about the web, even after all these years!

Future Development

The current to-do list for this project includes an RSS feed and a Twitter account, which will provide other ways to access the same set of links. If you have ideas for how this projects should evolve, please get in touch.