Tweetwine

A simple but tasty Twitter agent for command line use, made for fun.

Installation

Install Tweetwine as a RubyGem from GitHub:

$ sudo gem install tuomas-tweetwine --source http://gems.github.com

The program is compatible with Ruby 1.9.1, and it requires rest_client gem to be installed. In addition, json gem is needed for Ruby 1.8.6.

Usage

In the command line, run the program by entering

$ tweetwine [options...] [command]

The program needs the user’s username and password for authentication. This information can be supplied either via a configuration file or as an option (-a USERNAME:PASSWORD) to the program. It is recommended to use the former method over the latter.

The configuration file, in ~/.tweetwine, is in YAML syntax. The program recognizes the following basic settings:

username: <your_username>
password: <your_password>
colorize: true|false

When invoking the program, the supported commands are

home: Fetch friends’ latest statuses (the contents of the authenticated user’s home).
mentions: Fetch latest mentions for the authenticated user.
user [name]: Fetch a specific user’s latest statuses, identified by the argument; if given no argument, fetch the statuses of the authenticated user.
update [status]: Send a status update, but confirm the action first before actually sending. The status update can either be given as an argument or via STDIN if no argument is given.
friends: Fetch friends and their latest statuses.
followers: Fetch followers and their latest statuses.

If no [command] is given, the default action is home.

For all the options, see:

$ tweetwine -h

URL shortening for status update

Before actually sending a status update, it is possible for the software to shorten the URLs in the update by using an external web service. This can be enabled via the shorten_urls key in configuration file; for example:

username: spoonman
password: withyourhands
colorize: true
shorten_urls:
  enable: true
  service_url: http://is.gd/create.php
  method: post
  url_param_name: URL
  xpath_selector: //input[@id='short_url']/@value

The supported methods are get and post. The method chosen affects whether parameters are passed as URL query parameters or as payload in the HTTP request, respectively. Extra parameters can be given via extra_params key, as a hash.

The xpath_selector is needed to extract the shortened URL from the result.

The feature can be disabled by

not defining shorten_urls key in the configuration file,
setting key enable to false, or
using the command line option --no-url-shorten.

The use of the feature requires nokogiri gem to be installed.

Contacting

Please send feedback by email to Tuomas Kareinen < tkareine (at) gmail (dot) com >.

Tweetwine

Installation

Usage

URL shortening for status update

Contacting

Legal notes