I’ve always been curious to learn what folks say about a new technology. Twitter is an excellent hub for this kind of information, but what are the important topics related to a new technology (say ‘NoSQL’) on Twitter? A tag-cloud is a great way of visualizing the important topics. Aside from the actual links themselves, which can be used to drill-down to get more information about a specific topic, tag clouds can also show how popular the different topics are (the bigger the text size of the topic, the more popular it is).

To discover what folks have been talking about on twitter and additionally to learn more about Couchbase, I thought that it would be cool to try something more hands-on with Couchbase Server and the web. After browsing through a few open source libraries in python for twitter, creating a simple Couchbase Server 2.0 view using mapreduce in javascript and putting together an html page to host the tag cloud, the twitter-couchbase project was born on GitHub.

So what does it take to build a tag cloud like this?

First, you need to download and install the latest Couchbase Server builds available here and create a simple view using javascript map and reduce functions.

Next, clone the github project available here and modify the python script to set the twitter API credentials. Run the python script and watch new twitter tweets stream into a Couchbase Server database.

Finally, view the tagcloud using the webpage. Optionally, you can also use  jquery search if you wish to integrate a simple javascript based tag cloud text search feature to filter different topics in the tag cloud.

Simple isn’t it ! Moral of the story? Adding a twitter tag cloud backed by Couchbase Server is simple. Enjoy!

Author

Posted by Don Pinto, Principal Product Manager, Couchbase

Don Pinto is a Principal Product Manager at Couchbase and is currently focused on advancing the capabilities of Couchbase Server. He is extremely passionate about data technology, and in the past has authored several articles on Couchbase Server including technical blogs and white papers. Prior to joining Couchbase, Don spent several years at IBM where he maintained the role of software developer in the DB2 information management group and most recently as a program manager on the SQL Server team at Microsoft. Don holds a master's degree in computer science and a bachelor's in computer engineering from the University of Toronto, Canada.

One Comment

  1. eUKhost-Web Hosting Since 2001 October 23, 2012 at 5:43 am

    That\’s a really good feature,.

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