Nice one for the feedback, thats what I was hoping for.

I didn’t know about those Search parameters, Thanks for that.

We plan to add price validation or approval, so users can give a price a ‘Thumbs up’ or a verified vote if more that one person sends it in or can verify it on the site.

I thought about putting a form on the main website where people might submit prices there. We decided against it though, just to keep it to Twitter as it was initally designed. There are bugs in the parsing as you can see so the plan is to fix these up, allow for a couple of different syntax approaches and just do this stuff well rather than branching it out to Widgets.

Thanks for submitting prices, I have fixed that Douglas road input directly in the database, I’ll update the code to parse the input.

1. You can query prices just using search.twitter.com. For example, to see the petrol prices for Ballincollig since the weekend, you can just use a search string like:

“in Ballincollig” to:petroltweet since:2010-02-07

Sure, this might seem clunky at first and something for the power user. But it has a big advantage in that many Twitter clients let you save a search string for quick recall, i.e. people could get the latest price for their area in just a click or two.

2. If you introduced the concept of trusted price contributors (initially perhaps just by manually approving particular users, later by way of a web of trust) then you could automatically tweet (or possibly retweet) new prices from trusted contributors. This would allow people to see ‘quality assured’ prices as well as any old crap somebody might tweet at you. Or perhaps the trust concept should work in reverse, i.e. everyone is trusted unless you blacklist them.

3. You could very quickly put together a little widget (still using the Twitter infrastructure - not directly updating your database) that would enable people to contribute and query prices. Using a widget would have all sort of benefits. Most obviously, it would enable you to pre-populate lists with all the petrol stations and towns. Also, it would enable you to have greater structure on price update tweets. For example you could add hashtags or a geotag to more accurately describe the location (what happens now if you have prices for Dundrum in Dublin and Dundrum in Tipp?).

4. A map would be cool…

Cool, I’ll send you an email with the code and how to set it up.

Gordon.

I would love to give the script a go.

As far as GA is concerned I don’t think it makes any difference whether a page is dynamically constructed by the webserver or delivered from a static HTML file.

GA is triggered when the resulting HTML is rendered and the javascript GA code is invoked by a visitors’ browser. The browser itself passes on a string of information like the user’s IP address (which can tell you/your analitics software things like where they’re browsing from), OS, the URL they’re arriving from (along with any parameters, like search strings), etc.

So the short answer is yes, you can use GA just as effectively to track dynamic pages — with the added advantage that you don’t have to paste your tracking code into every page… you just add it to your template file and you’re done.

Well done - good idea - nice traffic generator. And if you do SW you should have unit tested those wellies.