Feeding our keynote addiction with Campfire Jan 16
7 comments Latest by Colin Nederkoorn
When an Apple keynote event is underway, we can’t help but load up the live blog feeds and discuss the spectacle in our internal Campfire chat room as it unfolds. It’s a lot of fun but it usually involves a lot of reloading and copying and pasting too. So when I found out Tuesday morning that Ars Technica would be covering the Macworld keynote live on IRC, I had an idea: why not write a script to do all the hard work for us?
Ten minutes later the Campfire relay bot was born. I hooked up a Ruby IRC library with Marshmallow (an unofficial Campfire library that we use to display Subversion commits) to create a bot that repeats everything from Ars’ #mwsf channel to a room in our Campfire account. If you’re interested you can read the resulting transcript and download the bot (see the campfire_relay_bot.rb file for configuration instructions).
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7 comments so far
mike 16 Jan 08
Or you could just, you know, log on to IRC , instead of writing IRC ↔ something else gateways.
SS 16 Jan 08
Mike, we’re logged into Campfire all the time, not IRC . Plus the #mwsf room is moderated so that only the Ars guys can speak. By piping #mwsf into Campfire we were able to have our own discussion around it.
August Lilleaas 16 Jan 08
Didn’t know you basecamp peeps did caps lock and leet punctuation in yer chat. Guess Apple keynotes has that effect on Apple fans =P
SH 17 Jan 08
@August Lilleaas, very rarely is any “l33t” speak actually spoken, but any time the subject is Apple, expect that our replies are always IN ALL CAPS ZOMG .
Serhei 17 Jan 08
So, judging by the section of the transcript you chose to publish the Macbook Air is not your type of laptop. Anyone care to share their thoughts?
Clint Ecker 17 Jan 08
Hey guys, thanks for using our IRC coverage. The keynote was blast, but seeing that you used it for your own purposes in this manner was even cooler!
Colin Nederkoorn 17 Jan 08
Cool. We do the SVN commit thing accompanied by a quote from Bender of Futurama.
We followed the keynote by projecting macrumors’ coverage onto the wall of betahouse and yelling about it at each other in person.
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