Responsive Astronomy Picture of the Day

Overview

Space is great. Every day the Astronomy Picture of the Day website is updated with a new image showcasing just how incredible the universe is.

The new updates are posted to the APOD Twitter account every day. In the UK this tweet is posted at 5:30am, so a lot of people see this update via their mobile phones. The problem is, the APOD web page is difficult to read on a mobile.

Using the Tweet Munger (Custom Translations) lab that I made a few months ago, I’ve written a quick script to detect when a tweet is posted by APOD to showcase the new picture of the day, created a mobile-optimised version of the web page that’s easier to read on a mobile device, and tweeted a link to this from a new account.

The new twitter account is APODR.

The Tweet Munger script made it really easy to detect new tweets and generate the updated page when a new picture has been posted.

In the new Tweet Munger ‘translation’ class, I duplicated the pirate default, removed all translations, but instead hooked into the ‘additionalMunging’ method that allows the tweet to be updated before being posted.

For the tweet itself I simply replaced the APOD URL with my own. At this point I also grab the APOD website HTML source code, and add in a few little tweaks to optimise it for mobile - adding a meta viewport element.