Over the last few days I’ve pursued my idea to build a “Twitter spammer detector” of sorts using only client-side technologies. I didn’t feel like setting up server components at all.

What was it supposed to do? It should check the number of followers of everyone on your contact list, the number of people they are following, and the ratio between those. If the person is following more than 1000 people (can be customised), and has a Following-to-Followers ratio higher than 1:1 (can be customised), you’d be informed (by a handy “Block” link).

Thanks to Pipes, the YUI libraries and the Twitter API returning JSON, I was able to finish the first version of Twitter Twerp Scan in a relatively short period of time.

My Javascript-fu is still a bit weak, but getting better. It’s a nice change to only have one local file to work with (excluding CSS, of course).

Over the weekend, the traffic to that page increased quite a bit, mostly because several people liked the idea enough to link the site.

I’ve set up a Twitter account for service updates etc. — twerpscan. The rest of my tweets will go to Carlo as usual.

YUI hosting. Nate on Free Hosting of YUI Files from Yahoo!:

Coinciding with this week’s release of YUI version 2.2.0, the one year anniversary of the YUI open-source release, and as announced at the YUI Party just moments ago, we’re opening up free YUI hosting from the Yahoo! network to all YUI implementers. If you’re using YUI for your own project, we’ll serve the files for you — gzipped, with good cache-control, using our state-of-the-art network, for free. You can count on these files being continuously available because they’re the same files, served by the same source, that we use for most YUI implementations at Yahoo!.

This is big, folks. Smart move, too.

Dell IdeaStorm. Dell.com’s new suggestions site kind of looks familiar. That said, I really like the idea of companies publicly gathering and displaying ideas from their users—when done right, this can be a win-win for everyone, so power to every company implementing one of those. Anyways, the one suggestion that made me grin?

Have Michael Dell try actually buying a PC using Dell.com

Google Apps. Business 2.0 Beta (how’s that for a blog name?) asks Are Google Apps’ Customers For Real?.

Here’s what Procter & Gamble actually says: “P&G will work closely with Google in shaping enterprise characteristics and requirements for these popular tools.” Translation: “One of our sysadmins is going to sign up for an account and send you bitchy emails about missing features.”

Don’t get me wrong, I like their web-based office tools, even though I don’t use them regularly. They’re well done, no doubt about it. But by now I find it somewhat unnerving that every single time Google launches something, it is hailed as the holy grail of the intarwebs.

Warcraft Lore, told by jokers. WOW Insider’s ‘Know Your Lore’ segments are pretty good. Every now and then they pick a person or event from the rich Warcraft history and recap it quickly in a fun way.

Arthas was the son of King Terenas Menethil, ruler of Lordaeron. As a youth, he trained in the art of combat and joined the Silver Hand, a group of paladins. He became known for his exploits in battle. He also briefly dallied with a young mage named Jaina Proudmoore, but it didn’t work out because long-distance things never end well. They decided to remain friends, which is as big a sign of impending doom as one can get.

The WordPress Comments System built with Yahoo! UI is seriously cool. [via Mike] I just can’t find a download… Am I blind?

Packet Garden is a cute way to “analyze” your network traffic, i.e. which sites you visit and where you get your data from. Builds a little planet from it, nice.

The aforementioned tech article is available now on YUIblog.com! It’s explaining a way to use the excellent YUI library in Greasemonkey scripts. I’m sure that this approach is neither the perfect nor the only solution to achieving YUI/Greasemonkey integration, but it works for me and I thought sharing can’t hurt.

Well, the article is here, and the example script can be downloaded from this very site.

Many thanks to Eric Miraglia for giving me a soapbox. :)

If you have comments and suggestions about the implementation, feel free to post a comment to the actual article.