Tag: twitter

I've been thinking lately about my own interactions online, especially around content. There are three main ways that I work with content: creating, curating and consuming. Each has their own place but I'll start by outlining each one.

Creating content is all about putting your own creations out for others to share. I've had this blog longer than I care to discuss and certainly since before microblogging was really a thing. It's much lower investment to throw out a quick tweet about something and in lots of cases it's a more appropriate medium

Like most PHP developers, I'm polyglot. My PHP project builds with phing, but uses a bunch of npm tools along the way to minify assets and those types of things. When I introduced TravisCI into my project, I was instantly confused by the requirement to specify the technology I was using ... all of them, surely?

In need of wisdom and advice, I turned to the best source I know:

How do people use @travisci with multiple languages? Project uses PHP and nodejs tools but I can't seem to configure both. Any links/advice?

—Lorna Mitchell (@lornajane) May 7, 2014

In case you missed it, Twitter updated their APIs recently, so that you have to authenticate to use even their search APIs to return publicly-available results. This is an increasing trend for API providers, to provide either very limited or nonexistent access for unauthenticated users, I think so they can rate limit consumers that swamp them. To cut a long story short, that meant I needed to update my dashboards that keep an eye on twitter searches to do more than just call file_get_contents in the general direction of the right URL.

I've been using ttytter for quite a while, it's a superbly inoffensive twitter client - and it's console-based. This makes it easy to use from the keyboard, fast, and also makes it look a bit less like twitter if that's not something people should be seeing over your shoulder!

I have customised a few settings which I find superhelpful, so I thought I'd share my config file and say a bit about some of the entries in there. The config for ttytter is held in a file called .ttytterrc in my home directory. Mine looks like this:

Recently the nice folks at Addison Wesley sent me a review copy of "The Developer's Guide to Social Programming" by Mark Hawker (you can find it here on amazon). This is right up my street as I'm doing so much with with APIs, social and otherwise, at the moment and the book covers things I'm using such as OAuth and google's services.

I've been looking into OAuth recently and really like what I see, so I started looking at actually starting to play with something that uses it (and isn't twitter). In the pursuit of this, I spent some time walking through the process of how to actually authenticate using OAuth, as a client. I chose Yahoo!'s service, because they have some fabulous developer documentation and have a standard OAuth implementation. Although you don't strictly need any special libraries to handle OAuth, that would be a bit like decoding XML with a regex, so I used the OAuth Package from PECL. For others (including me after I've slept), here's an outline of the process.

I've been using twitter for quite a while now, around a year. And so far, its not going brilliantly.

The problem really is that I don't "get" twitter. I am not online 24/7 so I often only look at my feeds once per day. The conversation in twitter moves …