A conference twitter wall with built in schedule & announcements

This twitter wall is preloaded with the Full Frontal JavaScript Conference details, but is easy to change and customise.

JavaScript customisation happens in config.js and style customisations in custom.css.

Also available as a service

If setting this up yourself is tricky or too much work, or even beyond your skill (I appreciate not everyone who runs a conference is going to be happy to code too), we're offering a full service with similar (but more) functionality at http://confwall.com. Please check it out - also available for free to free events.

Running the wall

Due to Twitter API 1.1 changes, the twitter wall requires a Twitter API proxy. The proxy allows you to make requests to Twitter's API from the browser. If you're a Node user, you can use Left Logic's twitter-proxy. Whatever proxy you choose to use, you need to tell the wall about it. To do so, modify the baseUrl in config.js.

Tweets

The twitter wall is able to both search for tweets and source tweets from a twitter list (though this is optional).

In the config.js you will want to set some values:

• search is the same string you would search twitter for to find tweets about your conference. The example provided in the config.js you can see includes multiple search phrases, so don't be coy!
• list allows you to curate a list on twitter of all your attendees and capture those tweets mixed in with the search results. This is an optional value.
• timings.showTweetsEvery gives you control of when to show each new tweet. The way this app works is collects (about 200) tweets in one go, then gradually shows them all, this showTweetsEvery value controls the rate that they're shown. The value must be in a valid timing value (see below)

To customise the HTML for the individual tweets, find the template in index.html and edit #tweet_template.

Saving tweets

I've included a simple Node app that will capture tweets as files both for debugging later, but also so you have a backup copy of all the tweets from the day (or days):

$ cd history
$ node server.js

This will read the config.js file and capture the tweets in the history/data directory. Setting the debug flag will then make use of these tweets and ignore the search value.

Timing values

A timing values are simply strings that are converted to JavaScript times. Simple to understand (I hope):

• "10m" is 10 minutes
• "5.5m" is 5 minutes, 30 seconds (as it's a floating point, and not minutes and seconds)
• "1h" is 1 hour
• "10s" is 10 seconds
• "100ms" is 100 milliseconds

Schedule

Open index.html and find the #schedule element. All the divs inside are rotated throughout the day. The important attribute is the data-time value. This is set to a 24 hour clock in hours and minutes so that 3:45pm is represented as <div data-time="1545">.

When the app starts it will automatically find the schedule element that is due next. By default it will show the next schedule exactly on time, but you can customise this using the config.js settings. Change timings.showNextScheduleEarlyBy to a timing value (like 10m) which will show the next schedule 10 minutes ahead of when it's due.

This is useful for when you have talks going on and the screen is being used for slides. Once the talk is finished, you can switch back to the twitter wall and it will be all set to show the next talk.

Edit the custom.css to give your own branded feel to the schedule.

Finally, if you wish to use a full sized background image on the schedule, the current time is applied to the #schedule element, which can be used in custom.css:

#schedule[data-time="0940"] {
  background-image: url(/images/sample/remy.jpg);
}

In the example above the schedule time matches the time in the data-time property for Remy speaking, so the #schedule element has it's background-image set.

Notices

This is a useful area to show sponsors and messages for the conference. Inside index.html find the #notices element and all the divs inside are rotated. Each notice is shown for the amount of time set in custom.js value timings.defaultNoticeHoldTime, but this can be customised for specific notices individually.

A notice is simply a div element. This can hold images, text and so on. To add a custom hold time, add the following attribute: data-hold-time="20s". This will show that particular notice for 20 seconds.

To make the notice appear over the entire app, add a class of fullscreen. By default this will overlay the entire screen, but if you want to animate this in place, edit the custom.css and edit the fullscreen class so the notice is offscreen, but make sure to restore the value when it's being shown. For example, if the #notice3 element should be fullscreen and slide up from the bottom of the screen:

#notices .fullscreen {
  top: 100%;
}

#notice3.show {
  top: 0;
}

Note that the #notice3 element has the show class and the top value is set to 0. As all the notice elements have animations set on all properties, so the animations should work.

Layout

By default the twitter wall takes up full height on the right, but if you edit index.html it's simple to rearrange the elements to suit your needs. Also look at the hflex-wrapper and other flex-box styles in app/screen.css to see more layout options.

Debugging

Be wary the more you test this, it's possible to get blocked by Twitter's rate limit. For that, I've included a debug flag in the config.js that will read static tweets (about my own conference, sorry) to populate the twitter wall.

In the wild

Let me know if you've used this project at your conference and I'll include it below (and feel free to send a pic - it's good for the ego!). So far:

• Full Frontal JS conf
• Chirp (twitter's first conference) (pic)
• beyond tellerrand 2011
• btPLAY 2012 (pic1 & pic2)
• Reasons to be Appy (pic1, pic2, pic3)
• beyond tellerrand 2012 (pic1 & pic2)
• All Your Base 2012 (pic1, pic2, screen capture)
• jQuery UK 2013 (pic1, pic2, pic3)
• All Your Base 2013 (pic1, pic2, pic3)

Feedback

Please do raise any issues, or even better, send a pull request to improve this project.