I was so pleased with the hardback version of my twitter book that I knew I had to make another book. And quickly.

At the Warblecamp hackday last Saturday/Sunday I set about making book from one of the twitter events I’d been following. The Twitter Calculus Wars is a fun project where three Algebra students from Michigan replayed the famous Newton/Leibniz rivalry on twitter.

I took their excellent work and turned it, along with some footnotes from wikipedia, into a 60 page book. You can download the final PDF here.

That was on Monday. The first printed copy of it arrived today (Friday). That’s just four days – some excellent service from lulu.com. It looks like it was printed in Eastbourne, whereas the hardback I’d previously had printed came from the states and took a bit longer.

Here it is:

I’m very, very happy with it. It feels like a book. I had worried that it wouldn’t – that it’d be too contrived, or there’d be some terrible flaw in the design that I hadn’t noticed, or that it just wouldn’t work in some way. But, it feels like a book.

The fonts work well, and I’ve learnt lots about the differences between screen and print. Some things that are difficult on the screen, work well in print – in this case, I was worried that using different fonts for footnotes and body copy would confuse. And on screen, it does somewhat; in print, it actually works well.

One other thing I learnt is that next time I’m making a twitter book, I’ll probably need to choose a font that has a hash (#) character. I had to cheat throughout and use the section mark (§) instead.

It’s a long while since I made something that I’m really proud of and that I don’t feel is compromised in some way. I’m getting back a lot of the confidence I’ve lacked recently, I think.

Anyhow, it’s easy and fun to get a book printed, and it’s pretty cheap too. It cost me $6 or thereabouts to get the copy printed and another $10 in super-express-do-whatever-it-takes-to-get-it-to-me-now postage. There are cheaper postage options available, if you’re more patient than I am.

The techniques I used were the same as with my twitter_book project. Firt, ruby scripts to pull tweets from twitter (and also wikipedia in this case) and emit some xml. Then, an xsl stylesheet to convert that xml into something I could feed into Apache fop. The resulting pdf was uploaded straight into lulu.com.

All of this makes me want to make another one. And quickly. Keeping my eyes open for ideas…

I’m still not sure what I think about the exercise.

Twitter’s the closest thing I have to a diary. I’ve never tweeted specifically in order to make a daily record, but that’s the form I chose for the book.

And, I’ve got my own, personal reasons for wanting a record of the last couple of years.

So, this book – it’s 393 pages, give or take. And it has just short of 5,000 of my tweets in it. It cost me £20 to get printed.

It certainly does work as a device to take me back to certain times and certain places.

I like the way the references to webpages, events, and even people are already somewhat cryptic and heading towards being lost altogether. I do wonder what I’ll think of it in 5, 10, 15 years time. I wonder how much I’ll remember.

In form, it reminds me of a play or script, and there are certainly dramatis personae. But I’m the only one who speaks, and there’s little drama to the thing.

Sometimes, though, in the midst of my ramblings are some magic tweets – our last night in Berlin; the 12-week scan; Leonard coming home from hospital.

Browsing through it feels like going through an old box of photos.

This version is something short of beautiful. But it’s a start. I’m going to literally put it on the shelf for a month or two and then come back to it.

In the meantime, if you want to make your own, you can try to run the scripts I wrote. I got this copy printed in Blackwells on Charing Cross Road, where they have a special in-store bookmaking machine. I’ve got another one on order from lulu.com in a slightly different format.

This is what I came up with.

The script takes one argument – the term to search on – and creates a sqlite3 database in the current directory containing all the tweets that the twitter search API returns for that term.

It requires datamapper and twitter_search gems to be installed.

Have at it, make it better, bend it to your twitter-slurping needs.

Yes, I know it’s already been done by tweetminster and there are lists on listorious, probably elsewhere too.

But there are none that I know of that are freely available, which are amenable to inserting into a database for twitter-bot magic, nor which connect to any other online profiles of MPs – I use the public whip ids from MySociety’s parlparse project.

Linked data, innit?

There are bound to be errors and omissions, so let me know if you have any corrections and I’ll update. And if there’s someone else doing this better, I’ll gladly defer to them.

Do what you want with this data – hell, you could even republish it in RDF if you want.