Receive AXNA updates on IM - twitter

I love holidays because i have a chance to code whatever i feel like coding. I’m using twitter more and more lately. I have configured it to send me updates via im.

The other i thought how cool would it be to receive axna updates via im too so i thought what the hell. Why not coding a python script that will ping axna every 5 minutes and send updates to twitter! :)

I haven’t even started coding it but i wanted to write this post while coding in order to see how much time this takes.

[7:34 pm]
I’m currently at home, waiting for the christmas dinner. I know i want to code this in python (i love how python feels). I’m running windows vista on my laptop and i’m about to download and install python + required stuff

[7:35 pm]
Downloading python + python-twitter + feedparser + simplejson . Registering the twitter account for this purpose -> http://twitter.com/axna

[7:37 pm]
Registration done! Took me 3 tries in order to register correctly. Installing all the downloaded stuff. Couldn’t find a simplejson installer for windows.

[7:43 pm]
Almost lost this entry because my laptop rebooted. I could not find a simplejson installer for windows so i’m going to code on the office’s linux server :(

[7:46 pm]
AXNA seems down. Awesome timing! :) The bad thing about coding on christmas is that family doesn’t let me concentrate.

[7:53 pm]
First series of tests done. Time to start planning the application. Should i release this as open source later? thinking out loud…

[7:57 pm]
I should store somewhere the already published to twitter entries so i won’t duplicate. I need a unique id. Maybe the axna link? will use mysql that is already installed on this server. I remember reading somewhere that twitter only accepts 7 twitts per minute. Will see if this is true.

[8:03 pm]
Installed python-mysqldb and setup the database+tables

[8:12 pm]
Ok, i’m done with the rss 2 database part. Now the twitter part.

[8:20 pm]
I’m done! :) Be right back. Need a beer

[8:29 pm]
Ok. Just finished a glass of whisky :) The script ran perfectly. Now i need to think a way to take advantage of the 140 max chars.

[8:31 pm]
Just read the rss format. I guess i can only post the blog title + entry title + link to entry.

[8:35 pm]
This server’s connection is slow. I’m going to setup the cron to run every 30 minutes.

To subscribe to im notifications just add “axna” to your twitter account and turn on notifications for it.

Hope you guys liked this! I had lots of fun writing it :) Merry Christmas!

— fernando

*Update 24/12/2007: Links are not being included because of the char limit. I need to implement tinyurl on the script before sending it to twitter — FIXED
*Update 24/12/2007: Entries are posted wrong. New posts are posted first and should be the opossite. — FIXED