Twog

By Jason Meridth

Twog is a simple application that parses an RSS feed and will tweet any posts it hasn’t already tweeted. Once you obtain OAuth access to a twitter account and provide it in the configuration and run Twog, it will tweet a prefix, your blog title, and a URL of the post. There are also options of using Bit.ly for URL shortening and you can install Twog as a cron job for automated polling.

Install

sudo gem install twog

Writing to Twitter With OAuth

Please read this if you want to know how to get your Twitter OAuth consumer key/secret and access token/secret.

One you have those, run the command:

twog —conf

and a hidden configuration file will be created in the your home folder (~/.twog/conf.yaml). Once there, please fill it out with the information necessary to use this tool.

Seeing What Will Be Tweeted

To see what will be Tweeted before it is, type:

twog -o

twog —output

Shortening Blog Post URLs With Bitly API

In order to use Bitly for URL shortening, you’ll need to go to http://bit.ly and click the Sign Up link on the top right and get an account. Once you are logged-in you click the Account link in the same top right area. You will see your API Key in the middle of the page.

Put your bit.ly username and api key into the ~/.twog/conf.yaml file to be used in the code.

Automating Polling With Cron

To install twog as a crontab job, run the command:

twog —cronadd N

where N is the number of minutes you want twog to fire off every time.

To remove twog as a crontab job, run the command:

twog —cronrm

Crontab Info for all my non-*nix bretheren.

Runtime Dependencies

TwitterOauth: Writes tweets to Twitter (Ruby)
Whenever: Sets up cron jobs (Ruby)
Bitly: Shortens URLs (Ruby)

Developer Dependencies

RSpec: Test and Mocking framework (Ruby)

TODO

Please check the issues on Github for future features or bugs that need to be fixed

Contributors

Matt Dietz (cerberus98) special thanks Chris MacGown (ChristopherMacGown) Paul Voccio (pvo) Joe Ocampo (agilejoe)