Whomwah.com

[UPDATE] Twitter have now turned of HTTP authentication which means until the plugin is updated to use the OAuth, it won’t work. I haven’t got time to update the plugin right now, but will when I do. In the mean while, the plugin code is available on github, so maybe someone else could add this support. Thanks.

[UPDATE] If you install my new revcanonical plugin, then TweetMe will use auto generated short urls from your own website, instead of going to a 3rd party site.

I’ve written a simple little WordPress Plugin to get me moving again. TweetMe posts a tweet to Twitter when you publish a blog post.

If you do a search on Google there are loads of similar plugins out there. The problem is after trying a few, none of them did what I wanted, and many of them seemed far to complex for the task in hand. I simply wanted this. Nothing more, nothing less:

• I enter my Twitter credentials once and they get validated.
• I decide how I want my tweet to look.
• When I publish a new blog post, it gets sent to Twitter.
• If I update that post, I don’t want it resent, unless I choose.
• That’s it….

So that’s all TweetMe does.

• Visit the TweetMe project page
• Download TweetMe from wordpress.org

I use Twitter. I don’t really post much, but I do like to dip in and hear what my friends are doing. Yammer is like a private Twitter for companies. We have just had a network set up for the BBC, which is interesting. Again, I like the idea of posting what I am doing and dipping into what other people are doing around the organisation.

So you can see my problem, I’m doubling up here a bit. When I post something to Twitter, and I think it would be relevant for work too, I don’t want to have to open a different interface and post it again. Now there are services like ping.fm which will sync every site you belong to, but I what to decide what gets posted at work and what doesn’t in this instance. The simple answer is to build something that looks at my Twitter feed and if it sees anything new, then posts it off to Yammer. My friend Mr Humfrey does that very thing. I wanted more than this though, I wanted to filter, plus I wanted to make it easy to use, so I have written this very simple app that does the job:

1. Read my Twitter feed every n minutes for changes
2. Keep messages with my chosen keyword
3. Remove keyword, and send off to Yammer

Twammer usage:

# Display help
./twammer -h
 
# check Twitter messages with last 5 mins (default)
# filter by #bbc but don't send anything to Yammer
./twammer -t 47983 -u user -p pass -f bbc -q
 
# check Twitter messages within last 10 mins
# send anything to Yammer. Show output
./twammer -t 47983 -u user -p pass -d 10 -v

This is designed to be run as a cron job. You must also make sure you run it at the same interval as the –delay in the app. Here’s what my crontab looks like:

0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /home/duncan/bin/twammer -t 47983 -u user -p pass -f bbc > /dev/null

[UPDATE] Changed to using the correct API instead of scraping the RSS

All good work is done in defiance of management – Bob Woodward

via Michael via twitter

I received an album at Christmas from my girlfriends brother called American Song-Poem Anthology. It features tracks that were created in the 60s and 70s by putting ads in the back of music magazines and relying on the general public to send in their own “song-poems”. This people were paid whatever they saw fit ($50-$100s), and then professional musicans would come record these songs in the hope of turning them into something to cherish. Make up you own mind if they did this or not. With tracks like : Jimmy Carter Says “Yes” and I Lost My Girl To An Argentinian Cowboy, they certainly had a sense of humour.