Twixer is a microblogging service client supporting Twitter and Identi.ca and is written in Python by Antonio Ognio

1. $> twixer
Microblogging service client
for the command line
Antonio Ognio
antonio@ognio.com

2. What is microblogging?
 Services like Twitter and Identi.ca (opensource)
 Publishing short fragments of text on the Internet
 “Real-time” Internet experience
 Good for sharing:
 News
 Opinions, thoughts, feelings
 Hyperlinks and information pointers in general
 A good way of getting:
 Feedback
 Sugestions
 Interacting with your users / customers

3. Microblogging Service Arquitecture

Websites
 Web interface (default)
 Webservice API (eg. RESTful)
 Ecosystem
 Complementary sites / services
 Custom clients

4. Who is using microblogging?
 Bloggers
 Geeks / tecnophiles
 Journalists
 Some celebrities
 Consultants / authors
 Opinion leaders
 Some websites (robots)
 FLOSS hackers

5. Why a client for the CLI?
 Natural environment for most hackers / sysadmins
Lighter and quicker to launch that a GUI or web
client
 Integration with other command line tools (e.g. less)
Simpler to mantain than a visual program (at least
using GNU/Linux)

7. ...also
 Un command line client is more discrete :)
 I get to send my tweet but avoid stay reading others :)
 Easier to integrate with scripts
 I have it installed on servers and a few VPS

8. Twixer
 Written in Python
 483 lines of code for now
 Depends on simplejson and tweethon
 Allows to:
 Send tweets
 Send direct messages
 Follow other users
 Unfollow other users
 Read the main timeline (friends)
 some other stuff...

10. http://code.google.com/p/twixer

11. Common uses:
Send a tweet
twixer "The contents of the tweet go here"
Send a private message
twixer -d account "Contents of direct message go here"
Timeline
twixer -f
Check out mentions and replies
twixer -r

12. Options
Usage: twixer [options]
Options:
--version show program's version number and exit
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-c CONFPATH, --config=CONFPATH
Path to configuration file
-v VERBOSE, --verbose=VERBOSE
-U USERNAME, --username=USERNAME
Username for your Twitter account
-P PASSWORD, --password=PASSWORD
Password for your Twitter account
-S SERVER, --server=SERVER
API server for microblogging service
-u USERNAME, --query-user=USERNAME
Query USERNAME instead of your user
-t, --timeline Show timeline of user
-d USERNAME, --direct=USERNAME
Send direct message to user
-f, --friends Show friends timeline
-r, --replies Show replies
-R, --direct-replies Show direct messages or replies
-p, --public Show public timeline
-a USERNAME, --follow=USERNAME
Follow user
-s USERNAME, --stop-following=USERNAME
Stop following user
-D ID, --delete-status=ID
Delete status by id
-X ID, --delete-direct-message=ID
Delete direct message by id
-l, --list-friends Show list of friends
-F, --list-followers Show list of followers

13. Installing from tarball
sudo easy_install simplejson tweethon
wget -c http://twixer.googlecode.com/files/twixer-0.1.2b.tar.gz
tar zxpf twixer-0.1.2b.tar.gz
cd twixer-0.1.2b
sudo cp twixer /usr/bin
cp twixerrc $HOME/.ttwixerrc
vi $HOME/.twixerrc
chmod 600 $HOME/.twixerrc
twixer -
Getting sources from Subversion
svn checkout http://twixer.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ twixer

14. Tip (long message as two tweets)
gnrfan@gnrfan-laptop:~$ twixer "Digg's move to NoSQL: This growth has
forced them into horizontal and vertical partitioning strategies..."
twixer "...that have eliminated most of the value of a relational
database, while still incurring all the overhead."
Status 24785310 successfully posted at Mon Mar 15 03:00:22 +0000 2010
Status 24785312 successfully posted at Mon Mar 15 03:00:23 +0000 2010
Follow a user
$ twixer --follow plugperu

15. Config file
[account]
username = plugperu
password = s3cr3t0
Path to config file:
$HOME/.twixerrc

16. Taking a look at the source code
http://code.google.com/p/twixer/source/browse/trunk/twixer

17. Suggestions, feature requests and bugs
http://code.google.com/p/twixer/issues/list

18. Twixer
http://code.google.com/p/twixer/