Tools
Launch Your Own Twitter Bot (PHP, Python, Ruby)
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 | code, Hack, Mashup, Open Source, RSS, Tools, Twitter | 2 Comments
If you use twitter you’ve undoubtably come across a twitter bot, sadly there’s a very good chance it was because it was spamming you. In this post I’ll provide you with all the tools, source code and know-how to be able to build and launch your own twitter bot, and i’ll even give you resources to do it in the programming language of your choice. Why? Because there are so many positive uses for a twitter bot….including anti-spam! Go take a look at the twitter tag project for some good examples of bots currents on twitter if you’re not able to come up with any on your own.
First, if you’d like to fool around with an automated bot on twitter but lack the technical knowhow, go pay a visit to the Botomatic site. There you can create your own bot using their easy-to-use GUI. It’ll take you two seconds and you will be up and running.
If you’re a beginner, have no fear there’s a pre-configured setup for you as well. Go download and install the Twitterbotscript from Tyler Colwell. It’s 100% free and was coded to include a helpful GUI to control the bot functionality. It’s actually a pretty cool package that uses the API. I’ve taken a lot of his code and re-used it in various test bots of my own so i’d definitely recommend anyone looking to script their own bot in PHP to download his app.
Now for the PHP programmers out there, the first example of a great PHP5 twitter bot framework is from the folks over at ohloh.net (Jason Allen and Scott Collison). This one is setup to allow you to search and retweet what you’ve found.
If you’d like to incorporate Jabber/XMPP into the bot (that way you can access it via gchat), then there’s a great tutorial over on jazzychad.com. Tenderapp.com has on their blog a PHP tutorial with full source-code for a twitter bot that will look up the traffic conditions and tweet them when messaged. This one also has a walk-through for getting it up on xmpp/jabber. Here’s the source for a similar bot that looks up the weather and retweets it on command.
If you’d like to setup a twitter bot using Python, Halotis.com has a great tutorial that uses a sqlite backend to keep track of what it’s messaged. For a more elaborate version of an automated bot using python, there’s a script over on the flowingdata.com blog that also incorporates a local mail server to send and receive messages to the bot.
Last but not least, all of you Ruby folks….here’s a Twitter Ruby Gem to go along with the Twitter4R and Twitter Ruby Gems already found in the library. The site also takes you through a few different commands available with this new gem. For complete source-code of a twitter bot written in Ruby, head on over to this snippet of a Ruby RSS Twitter Bot.
Easy as pie and now you’ve got your very own automated twitter bot!
Tracking Twitter – Directory of Brands on Twitter
Friday, March 6th, 2009 | Business, Marketing, Mashup, Tools, Twitter, WebApps | No Comments
Brand management firm ElectricArtists just recently launched Trackingtwitter, a site that tracks media, entertainment and consumer product accounts on the microblogging site.
Trackingtwitter follows Zappos, Whole Foods, Starbucks, Jet Blue and Comcast, among others. It broadcasts the brand category (“sports,” “television,” etc.), the Twitter usernames, number of followers, most recent tweet and any personal notes they may have collected about the account.
Recent Finds – NinjaFollow, The Fish Puzzle, Ajax Effects + More
Sunday, December 7th, 2008 | Hack, Open Source, photo-manipulation, Tools, Twitter, Utilities, Yahoo | No Comments
NinjaFollow
Need to unfollow or follow Twitter users in bulk? This website is for you. Quick and easy tool that utilizes Twitter’s API to mass-follow/unfollow
Coudal – The Fish Puzzle
Have some time to waste? Good, you’ll need it!
20 Ajax Effects You Need To Learn
Tutorials and source code, just how I like it.
Smush.it Image Optimizer
Quick and easy website that will optimize your images for viewing on the web. It’s an open-source project run by one of the members of Yahoo!’s “Exceptional Performance Team” – The same group that put out their YSlow Firefox application!
Enjoy!
Add SEO Friendly Social Media Links To WordPress
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 | Blogging, Hack, Open Source, Promotion, SEM, Tools, Twitter | No Comments
Jeff from over at Perishable Press has just posted a handy guide to adding code to your WordPress theme that will enable you to offer SEO-Friendly, fully validating social media links for each of your pages or posts. If you want the easy way of adding social media links to your blog, there are countless WordPress plugins that will do just that, this method is for those of you who want to use as few plugins as possible (a real lean mean blogging machine!)
He gives the code for Delicious, Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Blinklist, Furl, Reddit and AddThis (with more sites provided in the comments).
Here’s an example for Digg.com:
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Submit this post to Digg">Digg this!</a>
In order to add the code to each post, edit the single.php and paste in the appropriate code before the comments PHP tag. So you’d paste it before:
< ?php comments_template(); ?>
To add the code to your pages, edit page.php and paste the appropriate code after the PHP tag for your page content. So depending on your theme you’d paste it after:
< ?php the_content(); ?>
To have the links appear on the homepage after the end of each post, edit index.php and paste the appropriate code after the content PHP tag, though it might differ depending on your theme. So you’d paste the code this time after:
< ?php the_content(__('Read more'));?>
Go check out the full post for more examples.
Top 15 Twitter Power User Tools
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 | AIR, Beta, Hack, RSS, Tools, Twitter, Utilities, WebApps | 3 Comments
With the hundreds of Twitter applications, websites, bots and scripts out there designed to do just about everything under the sun for you and your Twitter account, I decided to compile my own list of the top 15 Power User Twitter Tools that really provide the most value. Speaking of which, if you like this list or feel that something is missing from it, follow me on twitter – @brentter and let me know.
This is my latest addiction. It’s a free service that sends you an email update whenever someone un-follows your twitter account. I don’t know why, but I figure they send you an email when someone starts to follow you, they might as well send one when they leave.
Pretty much this is Twitter for those of you with too many ‘groups’ or followers. It lets you break down your ‘tweets’ into separate feeds that you determine. These can be based on a specific topic, affiliation, location or any other attribute you manage to dream up. It’s also an Adobe Air desktop application that’s still in beta, so there are a few bugs from time-to-time.
Here’s a service that tracks all the links posted on Twitter and ranks them based on the number of recent appearances. There are then many different filter options you can run on the list to narrow it down and even an export function to grab it as an RSS feed.
Twitterfeed takes any RSS feed and posts it to your twitter account. Made specifically for auto-updating your twitter account every time you post a new entry on your blog, Twitterfeed can easily be used to post new entries from in just about any RSS feed (i.e. baseball scores from espn.com).
Now here’s a unique new service that’s still in beta and aimed at those trying to utilize Twitter as a marketing tool. With EasyTweets you can manage multiple Twitter accounts, schedule future tweets (i.e. special announcements), post items from your RSS feed and more. It’s still pretty new but is shaping up to be a great utility for managing your brand identity on Twitter.
#Hashtags are a way to automatically add your tweet to a specific category, for instance lets say I wanted to create a single location for anyone to be able to add to and see what’s being said about NYE09 on Twitter. I would just go and create the hashtag #NYE09 and anytime that a tweet contained #NYE09, it would automatically be added to the hashtag.org website. The beauty of this service is each hashtag has its own RSS feed and usage statistics. To start using hashtags all you have to do is follow @hashtags and anything with a # in front of it will be added to that specific group.
These aren’t really a ‘must use’ but they are pretty neat. They’re icons that twitter accepts as valid characters in tweets. To use them, just copy and paste the desired icon into your message box and voila!
A free collection of unique background patterns for twitter. Pretty cool designs to choose from created by the folks from olivemanna.
Here’s a service that lets you email twitter updates to your account as well as gives you the option to have all your twitter replies emailed back to you.
Here’s a cool new service that monitors keyword density on twitter to show us what the ‘Hot Trends’ might be, or at least what is the most popular topic. It’s updated every 20 seconds and also has a widget & RSS feed for your own personal use.
Here’s a brand-spanking-new service that lets your monitor/track twitter for up to three separate terms in real-time. It also lets you narrow the results based on the users location. RSS feeds available as well.
It’s a URL shortening service that also lets you track how many times people click on your link. Works with both Twitter and FriendFeed.
This is a cool little tool that lets you compare trends in Twitter through a variety of different graphical methods. It also has the latest “Hot Before” and “Hot Now” terms sweeping across the Twittsphere. This may look familiar because it was used a lot to show the difference in social media mentions that Barack Obama received compared to McCain in the last few weeks of the election.
Graph your Twitter stats including tweets per hour, tweets per month, tweet timeline and your reply statistics.
Twitter Search (formerly Summize)
Real-time searching of what’s being said on Twitter. Each search provides it’s own RSS feed along with the ability to search for specific users (i.e. @brentter). Formerly known as Summize, it was purchased by Twitter earlier this year. One more thing to note, it auto-updates with each new addition your search.
So, what do you use to manage your Twitter account? Tell me on here or by following me at @brentter on Twitter.
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