Sherlock and Twitter

Although I’ve been quiet about it, I’ve been a long-time fan of BBC’s Sherlock. And now that the second season has me on the edge of a cliff, I need to find something to do before it picks up production in 2013 (I know, that long!).

So what am I to do with all this time? Well, in this new series, social media is used to describe crimes as they play out. At the end of the first season, Sherlock was seen a few times tweeting (well, microblogging) the answers to Moriarty’s problems.

I think the lightweight, large, clean page he uses to post updates is awesome, so I’m going to try and duplicate that. At the moment, I’m reading up on OAuth and Twitter’s API, but it looks like someone has already written a wrapper for that so coding a simple page should be a piece of cake. The problem comes in when authenticating the poster as myself, since this will need to run on a server with PHP installed. I don’t want other people posting as me!

There’s another route I can take to accomplish this clean page feat. I can always look at twitter.com’s post box, extract the HTML and re-link the JavaScript, and write some CSS to style it. That should result in a nice and clean page, plus I don’t have to muck around with any server-side junk. I think this is be best way to go, so I’ll try it first. Everything should be working in three hours, and I’ll probably play around with the styling for a few days. Expect to see this up on my GitHub page, too. I think other people who like the show will get a kick out of it. :)