Thursday we released a revamped design of Politwoops! You can read about some of the changes to the features and content in Nicko’s post on the main blog, but the main news of the day is that we’ve now open sourced the code. That means, you can create your own Politwoops instance to track the deleted tweets of any subset of people you fancy.

Of course the original concept and codebase is from the Open State Foundation. The code is split into two github repositories: one for the workers that track and import deleted tweets and their related screenshots and the other that includes the Rails project for the web frontend. The two parts simply share a MySQL database. The original OSF codebase for the web frontend included several non-Politwoops related features that were superfluous for our requirements, so we’ve stripped them out of our fork to make a slimmed down, twoops-only, version. However, our fork of the repository for the backend diverges relatively little from the OSF one.

Special shout out to Caitlin Weber for the fun, new design!