Twitter, Awards, and Lock Downs? Oh my!
My oh my was this week busy! So much happened, I couldn't even decided what to blog about today! I have some cool code stuff to share, and personal stuff to talk about. To not make you have to click between so many posts, I am just going to blog about the three most important parts in the week. The only thing involving code will be the Twitter part, but I will keep it brief.
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed me sending some strange tweets out. Well, those tweets (now not there, of course) were sent out from the php running this site! So I decided I needed a way to automatically let people know when I post here, and obviously the best way to reach people is through social media. I decided to try to get automatic posting from both Twitter and Facebook. Unfortunately, Facebook has been panning out to be a bit more complex to use, but I will try to get that working as well. Anyways, I was able to make my site send tweets through some php. First I got the Twitter API (Found here: ). The API was pretty simple to set up, I go old style and download the files and move them myself to the server. Once you set up the files, all you have to do is:
$root = $_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]; require $root . "/inc/twitter/twitteroauth/autoload.php"; use Abraham\TwitterOAuth\TwitterOAuth;
From there, you can use any class found in the API. Posting a tweet is extremely simple. All you need aside from the API itself is the information from Twitter. You need a consumer key and secret, as well as an access token key and secret. You get those through Twitter's App platform, https://apps.twitter.com/ Create an app, and follow the simple instructions to get all you need. Posting a tweet is extremely simple.
$twitterCon = new TwitterOAuth($consumer_key, $consumer_secret, $access_token, $access_secret);
$parameters = [
"status" => $tweetText
];
$twiiterResult = $twitterCon->post("statuses/update", $parameters);
If everything is set up correctly, there will be a tweet on your account with what $tweetText is set to. Pretty sweet right? If you want updates on this blog via Twitter, go ahead and follow me @LeRealJoseRivas and you will see the updates.
Triumphant Troubadour Award
Last year, they started a program at Santa Susana called the Triumphant Troubadour Award. The award is given to the student that has had the most impact on each participating teacher. Last year, 18/50 teachers participated, this year, 25 teachers participated. Because of the Redesign, Mr. Big Data selected me for the award. On Tuesday night, they held an ceremony to give out the awards to the students. The teacher was supposed to say something about the student and vica versa. However, Mr. Who Moved My Cheese didn't show up, so Mr. Torti, the assistant principal read what Mr. Smoke Detectors Detect Smoke wrote about me. He wrote a PAGE AND A HALF about me and EVEN INCLUDED A "PAUSE AND WAIT FOR LAUGHTER" it was a pretty annoying, but it was better that Torti gave it to me. The award is a nice thing to have, and I feel like I earned it, so besides the circumstance of who gave me the award, I am very glad and grateful for the award. Tomorrow morning, I will add an "Awards and Recognition" section to my resume on my website.
Santa Susana Lock Down
Wednesday started out pretty normal. I went to 2nd period, worked on Calculus (we are prepping for the AP Test). Then I went to 4th period, and took the test for Huck Finn that we were scheduled to take. About half way into the block period (at around 11am) there was an announcement over the PA that there was a lock down. Now, when you hear that, you can tell if it's a drill or not by reading the teacher's expression, if they look confused or surprised, then it is not a drill. My English teacher looked pretty confused, obviously not freaking out or anything, but had a subtle raised eyebrow that I quickly caught on to. About 30 minutes in, he puts on the Smart board that there was apparently an armed robbery nearby and the police locked down the school as a precaution. Ok, so we are now an hour into the lock down, and suddenly the door comes unlocked, and the school principal, Ms. Mayea peaks in and asks for me. She hurries me to her office, and tells me that the district has released information about the lock down and we needed it up on the site. She wanted me to make the update in the office so that the people there could be at ease knowing the public was being informed. I was in there for about 30 minutes thanks to my computer being a slow machine. While I was in there, I overheard talk of checking for kids with detonators, Homeland Security showing up, even having kids step out of classrooms to have a dog sweep the classroom. Obviously this meant that the situation was a little more serious than an armed robbery. After I made the update, Mayea thanked me and told me that there might be more updates, but I could stay in the classroom with my friends and work from there, so that was I did. At around 1:30, the lock down was still going on. The district sent out information (I, of course, was on top of every update so I can post it) saying that the reason for the lock down was that there was a bomb threat sent to school district, and they locked down the school. Tensions slightly grew because of the high stakes, however, we were strangely relaxed in the classroom. Something about the fact that there was likely no bomb (considering we hadn't blown to bits yet) made us more comfortable with the situation. We even had a police escort to give us a bathroom break! I was pretty entertained because I had my laptop and was able to go on YouTube while checking my emails, and the district website to see any more updates. At 2:44 (4 minutes before we are dismissed from school on block days) the district sent out a message that we were going to be let out at 3pm. When 3pm came around, Mayea announced that they were giving free cafeteria food, because we had to miss lunch. Free food always tastes better. After eating, my brother and I went home, because the teacher for his after school class decided that his students were in no shape to work (the class is a video production class). I am continuing to keep the website updated concerning the lock down. Keeping that updated caused something VERY exciting to happen, but I will write about that more as I have more information.
So that was a pretty crazy week. Have any thoughts? Go ahead and leave a comment! I added the Facebook comment plugin to the blog, so you can leave a comment on an individual blog post if you would like.
-José Rodriguez-Rivas
