View live site at http://links.orbitingfrog.com
This is an automated set of links currently being tweeted by the astronomers of Twitter. I take a small set of my favourite astro-Tweeters, and follow their tweets, and the tweets 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 here.
I'm tracking myself (seems like a good a place to start as any!) and 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 useful of this page.
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.
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.
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.