We also need bti to post our tweet. You can find it here (the last version needs liboauth to be able to post on twitter. I’ll explain this later).
Let’s start with status.net, since this is fucking much easier than with twitter (stupid Oauth).
(The FriendTimeLine is all your friend dents + your dents).
This is really easy, just do:
rsstail -u
http://identi.ca/api/statuses/friends\_timeline/your\_user\_name.rss
-N -z -P -l -i 120 -n 0 > path/to/the/irc/server/\\\\#the\_chan/in
Yes, jut one line of bash and yes, it is really easy to transform this into a multi account status.net client.
For the options, -N remove “title: ” and “link :” from the default formating. -z and -P is to avoid quitting if errors occurs. -l show the links. -i 120 is the sleeping time between checking for news updates. -n 0 is the number of item to show at startups, 0 means nothing will appears except the new ones.
(You can ind those links here: http://identi.ca/api/statuses/friends_timeline/your_user_name.rss)
Since not all software are perfect, rsstail might stop working after few days (dunno why), here is a quick fix to keep it up:
echo "true" > .while\_cond #only once
while true; do rsstail -u
http://identi.ca/api/statuses/friends\_timeline/your\_user\_name.rss
-N -z -P -l -i 120 -n 0 > path/to/the/irc/server/\\\\#the\_chan/in;
if [ $(cat .while\_cond) = "false" ]; then break; fi; done
This will keep rsstail up forever. If you want to stop it, just do an echo “false” > .while_cond and kill the rsstail instance (ps aux | grep rsstail etc...). Don’t forget to do an *echo “true” > .while_cond* after that to avoid breaking the reboot mechanism of your other rsstail instances.
One last (dirty) trick to have an header with colors if you wish to distinguish multiple feeds easily:
rsstail -u http://identi.ca/api/statuses/friends\_timeline/your\_user\_name.rss -N -z -P -l -i 120 -n 0 -Z '\\\\e[35;4m@your\_user\_name:\\\\e[0m' | while read -r line; do echo -e "$line" > path/to/the/irc/server/\\\\#the\_chan/in; done
To post we need to parse the output of the irc chan. Here is a small script that do that, the command is !twitter:
Warning: dirty code.
#!/bin/bash
CHAN="#your\_irc\_chan"
tail -n 0 -f path/to/the/server/$CHAN/out | grep -v --line-buffered "<bot\_name>" | grep --line-buffered "\\\\>" \| while read -r line
do
# debug
printf '%s\\\\n' "$line"
message\_text=\`printf '%s\\\\n' "$line" | sed 's/.\\\\+> //'\`
case $message\_text in !debug)
echo "working!" >> path/to/the/server/$CHAN/in ;;
!twitter\\\\ \*)
temp=\`printf '%s\\\\n' ""$message\_text"" | sed 's/!twitter \\\\?//'\`
printf '%s\\\\n' "$temp" | bti --account user\_name --password your\_password --action update
if [ ${#temp} -lt 141 ]
then echo "Grand succès !" > /path/to/the/server/$CHAN/in
else
echo "Big tweet, might not work (${#temp} chars)" > path/to/the/server/$CHAN/in
# here, I still post because identica automaticaly tinyfied the
# urls he received and I was to lazy to wrote a way to
# calculate the effective size of a dent with urls in it
fi ;;
esac
done
As you can see, this script is really simple and very extensible. you can add as much accounts as you want and as much commands as you want. Congratulation, you now have a multi-account status.net client in just a few lines of bash.
If you wrote more code use printf + ‘’ instead of echo to avoid execute of malicious code coming from irc.
The status.net api with curl examples that you can easily add to the previous script.
And voilà, you have everything you need to build your own status.net client.
Twitter is really similar to status.net at the exception that they have this stupid oauth. Here are the tricks to works with oauth:
If it’s you identi.ca/status.net account that post on twitter, jump this part and just post on the identi.ca one as specified before.
You’ll need bti compiled with `liboauth <http://liboauth.sourceforge.net/>`_.
If you install liboauth from sources on a debian, don’t forget the –prefix=/usr.
This is the easiest part of working with twitter, you just have to configure bti according to this blog post (the last part of the post).
Now, the dirty part. You’ll need twurl, it is a curl with the oauth support, and a webserver where you can place a static file. If you don’t have a webserver, you can simple do:
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
This will launch a basic http server that will display the current folder.
If you are running a debian lenny, you’ll need the lasted versions of rubygems (not the one in the pkgs) to make twurl works.
Twurl README explain how to register it to twitter.
Now, you can get your FriendTimeLine. Just do:
twurl /1/statuses/home\_timeline.xml > path/to/your/httpserver/folder/twitterfriendtimeline.xml
I don’t know why, but this command has refused to works in crontab, so I’ve simply do a (in a screen):
while true; do twurl /1/statuses/friends\_timeline.rss > path/to/your/httpserver/folder/twitterfriendtimeline.xml; if [ $(cat .while\_cond) = "false" ]; then break; fi; sleep 120; done
Now you have your FriendTimeLine accessible by rsstail and you can use the same solution than for status.net.