After a month long summer vacation, the Gene Wiki Pulse Twitter feed is once again alive and tweeting. While I suppose this little guy probably isn’t going to get anyone tenure, its one of my favorite pet projects here at Gene Wiki Central and I’m very happy to have resurrected it. I love it because it provides a live, global view of the work being conducted on the Gene Wiki by thousands of people all around the world. My interest is largely in understanding and improving the knowledge assembly system running here as a whole, so the ‘oooh look how much is happening! feeling’ is enough for me to be an excited follower but I do hope that the updates are also useful to people that simply want to know more about their favorite genes…
For the technically inclined, the vacation was the result of the system clock on our server drifting forward about 10 minutes into the future (and ISMB and the move to the new office). Since the pulse only looks two minutes into the past, it suddenly became highly unlikely to pick up any new edits! Thanks to our new associate Erik for fixing the network time on our server and for suggesting the new, much more efficient watchlist-driven approach to monitoring Gene Wiki activity that is running now. If you want to write your own Wikipedia watching and tweeting program you can find the source code for this in the gene wiki repository in the class StreamAccess.