ThinkUp

  Archiving social media data with ThinkUp

Bubba servers are a great for backing up (and analysing) data from web applications and social networks. There are a few different tools available to do this, but for its ease of installation and flexibility, I'm going to use ThinkUp in this instance. I

ThinkUp is a new(ish) open source tool for storing and analysing social media data, such as Twitter and Facebook information. It has a web installer and instructions available, but there are a couple of extra steps to get it up and running on Bubba.

You can download ThinkUp from the download page and unpack the file in your web directory (and for those with development chops, a git version is available).

wget http://github.com/ginatrapani/thinkup/downloads

tar -xvf thinkup-0.3.zip

You will also need to ensure you have write permission to certain directories. Just navigate to the web installer and it will tell you which ones. If you’ve saved it in your web directory under the name ‘thinkup’, you can access the installer at:

e.g. http://bubba.local/thinkup/install

This will flag any problems or missing requirements. For example, the compiled view directory needs to be given write access:

chown -R www-data /home/web/thinkup/_lib/view/compiled_view/

The requirements for ThinkMap also includes the cURL php library, which is not enabled on bubba servers out of the box. 

Installing cURL

You can install cURL using apt-get:

apt-get install php5-curl.

Open the php.ini file using whatever text editor you have:  

nano /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

vi /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

You then need to add the following line to your php.ini file, under extensions :

extension=php_curl.so

any changes to the php.ini file will require a server restart: 

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Because of the way PHP is setup on Bubba, you also need to create a symbol link: (solution hat tip: http://forum.excito.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1854&p=8626&hilit=php5#p8626):

ln –s /etc/php5/conf.d/curl.ini /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/curl.ini

Now, return to the browser and reload the webinstaller. If all is well, it's time for configuration.

Help I didn't get the mail!

Now if you don’t have mail set up (and the installer directs you to PHP mail), there is a workaround to activating the user account. You need to access the owners table and change the field is_activated fto 1 in your database manually. This will activate your account and allow you to login.
log in.

Configuration

The next step is to complete the host and database details but, again, the installer should walk you through these steps. If you have set the right permissions, it will even set up the database for you.