#tweetpin

tweetpin is a daemon that reads messages from a beanstalk queue and post them to twitter.

The daemon developed for http://board.gr that requires to post some info for new blog posts on twitter.

If you find this script useful please feel free to modify it according to your needs.

#Usage

Before you use the script you need to have installed the following gems

• beanstalk-client
• twitter
• daemons

All the required parameters for the daemon are stored in the config.yaml file. Please, have a look at the example config file and modify it accordingly.

The default path for the configuration file is /etc/tweetpin/config.yaml

#How it works

Suppose you have a rails blog application and you want to post all new blog posts on twitter. You can create an ActiveRecord Observer for the post model (or whatever is called), and publish the post title and the string returned from the to_param() method of the post to the beanstalk queue.

The following example sets the string to return from the to_param() method in the post model.

def to_param
  "#{id}-#{title.parameterize}"
end

Observer example code:

For the rails application you can use the ActiveMessaging framework.

require 'activemessaging/processor'

class PostObserver < ActiveRecord::Observer
  include ActiveMessaging::MessageSender

  publishes_to :tweets_queue

  def after_create(post)
    tweet = YAML.dump(:path => "#{post.to_param}", :title => post.title)
    publish :tweets_queue, tweet
  end
end

As you can see in the above example the observer just publishes the title and string (the string will be used by INU to construct the URL) in YAML.

The twitter update then collects the message from the beanstalk queue, constructs the post URL, shorts the URL using bit.ly and finally post the message to twitter.