citizen428.blog()

I’m currently toying around with some ideas for Twitter bots etc. so I had a look at some of the available gems out there. Sometimes Ruby makes stuff almost too simple… Here are a few nice snippets of what you could do with a couple of minutes time and some Ruby:

Automatically translate all tweets for a given keyword:

Daemonize the above:
Alternatively you can also follow a userid instead of a keyword and daemonize the whole thing, thus making it super easy to create a bot which posts translations of Matz’s tweets:

If you put this into a file like transbot.rb, the command ruby transbot.rb will give you all the regular daemon commands like start, stop, etc.

Ruby is trendy
Curious of getting a list of current trends on Twitter, without hashtags? There you go:

Combining all these ideas you could easily write a bot that follows the current Twitter trends and posts translations of them in only a couple of lines.

Tweeting the URL of the article you are currently reading can be quite cumbersome: start your Twitter client if it isn’t already running, copy the URL, shorten it, paste it into the client…

I therefore wrote a little Ruby script I can call from the command line and which will do all this annoying work for me. As an added bonus you can pass in hashtags as command line parameters. It’s just a quick and dirty hack, feel free to change it according to your needs…

Although I do love my Soup, Twitter and all those other microblogs, tumblelogs and whatgotyou, I recently feel the urge to sometimes write proper long blog posts rising again. Therefore I once again resurrected this blog (I slowly start feeling like the George Romero of blogging), gave it a proper facelift and am now ready to roll again.

On a related note, I’d like to inform you that my 2 Feedburner feeds will get deactivated in 30 days. To be honest, I can’t even remember why I got them in the first place, but I’m pretty sure I had a really good reason back then (“Are you pondering what I’m pondering?”). Anyway, there’s still plenty of subscription options here and on Soup, so you really don’t have to stop stalking me if you don’t fell like it.