Hashtagl

hashtagl is a twitter tool.

Currently we're supporting two functionalities:

bestTags

takes a hashtag as input and gets 100 "top" tweets containing that hashtag. It then parses all hashtags within these tweets and yields them ordered by frequency. In a nutshell it provides you the the "best" hashtags to use to promote a tweet / insta post. As I'm writing this,

./ht.js search reactjs

yields

[
  'javascript',        'nodejs',              'reactjs',
  'coding',            'programming',         'vuejs',
  'python',            'angular',             'developer',
  'php',               'code',                'node',
  ...
]

followers

takes a user screen_name and search words. It consecutively reads the user's followers and searches their location and description fields for the search words. To find K8S users in Berlin you could e.g. parse through Kelsey Hightower's follower list like

./ht.js followers kelseyhightower Berlin

Note that the Twitter API is quite strongly rate limited and each response only contains up to 200 results. We therefore hard limit the loop to 15 requests, allowing you to scan up to 3000 followers at once.

Credentials

To communicate with Twitter's API you need credentials to authenticate yourself using the Application-Only Flow. Copy .env.dist to .env and add them there.

Command Line

ht.js is our cli tool.

API

index.js contains a simple zeit-micro server that exposes the functionality. Personally I deploy it on now.sh (see now.json ). Add your credentials to a local .env file and npm run start to start it. I added micro-dev for our convenience, try micro-dev for a reloaded hacking experience.

Frontend

based on create-react-app. Add an API endpoint from above to its local .env file and build with npm run start (or npm run build to build the production version). You get a nice responsive, PWA ready tool to find hashtags on the go. Comes with a textfield and a copy button for quick usage. I added a netlify.toml so it should be deployeable to netlify without any issues. Note that the API must be deployed seperately, its endpoint can be added as a secret to Netlify's builder.

No demo??

Since this relies on my personal credentials I'm not disclosing the URL where I deployed it.

opinionated choice of technology

• Yes, I'm using plain Javascript here. No I won't explain that decision. Yes, I'm fine with it
• Bulma is awesome. It's actually bad. But it's awesome.
• React is better than any other frontend library. Try it.
• there are gazillions of Twitter clients in node. I chose Twit which is merely an authorized http wrapper. It's simple enough.
• Zeit/Micro is good for simple APIs. It's not exactly made for our use case (but rather a tool for serverless deployments) but I still like it.
• Commander is not the most common CLI abstraction but it comes with a very intuitive command configuration.