code in the ruins

I've been feeling dissatisfied while trying to read the Twitter statuses of people I'm following. What I usually want to do is read everything that has come in since the last time I posted something. Unfortunately, this is hard to do on Twitter's website. I have to go back through the pages, one by one, to find my last tweet, then start reading upwards and backwards until I get to the beginning again. It's a lot of work and the page load times could be better, so it leaves a lot to be decided.

I decided to use the Twitter API to write a command-line client that would check Twitter every so often and spit out new updates. Turns out I didn't need to do much work: Twyt is an existing Python implementation of the API. I was going to write it in Python anyway, so I downloaded Twyt (on Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install python-twyt) and started poking around.

It wasn't immediately clear how to get started, but I read through Twyt's files until I figured out how to authenticate, fetch status data, and turn it into usable objects. I added some extra stuff to print out color text and to periodically check Twitter, and I've got something I can really use. The code is here: twitmon.

I haven't tested it on Windows; it should work in general, but the text colors may not. The colors can be turned off in the script. Normally, it will use the colors to highlight links and usernames. It will also highlight the current user's username separately from other names; I like this because I can quickly tell if anyone mentions me, and I can find my last tweet quickly.

Update: I've fixed the script to work with Twyt 0.7 (which is the version in Ubuntu 8.04) and 0.8 (which is currently the latest version). You can also now send updates to Twitter with it - just type them and hit enter, and they'll show up on the next refresh.