* * * * *
                                        
                             Stupid Twitter Tricks
                                        
An off-site meeting was canceled, although I didn't find out about it until I
got off-site. Afterwards, I slacked off a bit.

Okay, quite a bit.

I came across this post [1] on one of the blogs I follow, and I was
mesmerized. Not by the the actual post but by the often times totally
irrellevent picture John Wiseman adds to his posts. And in this case, it's a
portion of a screen capture of a Twitter-based site [2], and John's comment
about said picture: “Jenny Holzer is the only person who should be allowed to
use Twitter.” Jenny's site [3] reads like surreal fortune cookies, much like
the monster quote file I have (over 2,600 quotes).

I've seen Twitter once or twice; enough to get the point of it—it's
LiveJournal [4] on crank [5], but something about Jenny's site reminding me
of my own monster quote file inspired me to do a “Stupid Twitter Trick™”—
sending out my quote file via Twitter [6].

Two aspects of this little hack (and that's what it is, a gross hack if you
ask me) were time consuming. First, cleaning up my monster quote file.
Twitter limits you to 160-character messages (with a preference of 140
characters). Three custom programs for this—one to pull out quotes 160
characters or less (and to mark the 140^th character). The second one to trim
unwanted spaces. And the third to go through converting the quote character
from the unappealing " to the much more typographically nice “” pair.
Extensive use of sed to make some other typographical substitutions (such as
converting “--” (two dashes) into “—” (a proper em-dash)) and a visual once-
over to make sure I didn't muck things up, and an hour or so later, I have
almost 2,000 quotes ready for Twitter.

The second time-consuming bit was writing this bit of code, which took about
an hour:

> #!/usr/bin/perl
> use strict;
> use Net::Twitter;
> 
> my $later   = `./later`;
> my $message = `./quote -n`;
> my $twit    = Net::Twitter->new(
> 	username => 'siwisdom' , 
> 	password => 'XXXXXXXXXXXX');
> my $result  = $twit->update($message);
> 
> `at -f ./at-jobs $later`;
> 
> exit 0;
> 

And no, it didn't take an hour because I'm a slow typist. It took an hour
because to install Net::Twitter [7] I needed to install JSON::Any [8], and in
the process of installing that I apparently activated the CPAN [9] module
that wanted to install and update itself, and that took an hour (I swear, it
seemed to download the entire CPAN archive—sigh).

The later program picks a random amount of time between three and nine hours,
which is given to the at command. at is like cron, in that you can schedule a
program to run at a particular time, but unlike cron, which runs the program
on a set schedule, at is a one-shot deal. I use at because I don't want a set
schedule to post quotes to Twitter—I want it randomized a bit. quote is a
program I wrote ages ago to pull quotes out of a quote file sequentially.

Like I said, a quick hack for a stupid Twitter trick.

Oh, and the name? “siwisdom”?

It's short for “silicon wisdom,” as a pun on Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom [10],
if you will.

[1] http://lemonodor.com/archives/2007/07/powerset_antihype.html
[2] http://twitter.com/
[3] http://twitter.com/jennyholzer
[4] http://www.livejournal.com/
[5] http://www.secondchanceinc.com/CRANKTHEWORKINGMAN'SDRUG.html
[6] http://twitter.com/siwisdom
[7] http://search.cpan.org/~cthom/Net-Twitter-1.04/lib/Net/Twitter.pm
[8] http://search.cpan.org/~perigrin/JSON-Any-1.08/lib/JSON/Any.pm
[9] http://www.cpan.org/
[10] http://www.robotwisdom.com/

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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