ANN Twitling: a Twitter link digest tool#

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:54:57 +0000

Problem: I can't keep up with the Internet

I often check Twitter on my phone. When I see tweets with links in them I tend to skip over them intending to return later when I'm on a computer with a full-size screen, and then forget about them either because I find something else to look at or I can't be bothered with scrolling all the way down again. And looking through old tweets is nearly as bad on the full-size twitter web site as it is in a mobile client.

Proposed solution: I need a computer program to read the Internet for me

Thus, Twitling: a small script consisting of Ruby and Sinatra and OmniAuth and the Twitter gem and Typhoeus to grab links in parallel, the function of which is to read one's timeline and display the resolved URL, the title and an excerpt from the text of each link that was posted. Source code is on Github.

I haven't really used it myself yet in anger: the first thing I notice while testing it is that there are a whole lot more links in my feed than I thought there were, and the original plan to produce a 24 hour digest might become very unwieldy.

Possible further development ideas include

• speed it up, by prefetching, better caching, or fetching the links asynchronously and client-side

• an "older" link at the bottom of the page

• Atom/RSS output so it gets fed to me every so often and I don't have to remember to check it

• email output (for the same reason)

• some css gradient fills just to make it look modern (hey, I already used text-shadow, what do you want, round button borders?)

• your suggestion here: email dan@telent.net or open an issue on Github. Bug reports too.

Try not to break it, please.