My brother-in-law has a rather wonderful 1930s Cocktail Cabinet. Inside there’s a light which he switches on declaring the “bar is now open”. So we got to thinking and because we’re both geeks, connected the light to the Internet via a simple photocell and of course Electric Imp. Now when he switches the light on it auto tweets via his Twitter account that the bar is open and the opposite when he turns the light off, plus it updates the site http://isphilipsbaropen.com Works perfectly. Yes I could have jacked the switch but this works just as well without having to potentially damage the bar.
I used Codebird and PHP to do the auto tweet stuff and used the Imp’s server.save() to save out the current state of the bar so it only tweets and updates when the bar changes state.