UPDATE (7/6/2009): I’m actually working on a service for this. It should be ready for testing soon (of course, soon is a relative term). If you want to be in the limited alpha test, leave a comment on this post. I’ll be selecting a few people to help me test. You have to have a cell phone in the U.S. though. ~Thanks.
Well, it’s been a few days now and my solution for getting my Twitter replies on my phone is working pretty well. In case you missed it, check this post for part 1. So I figured, if it works for me, maybe it’ll work for other people too.
This is (I think) the first script I’ve released for anyone to download. So that’s kind of cool. Maybe no one will download it–or maybe many people will. Doesn’t matter to me really.
OK, so there’s a few things I want to point out though.
- You have to have your own host of course. I wish I could configure it and let everyone use mine, but I don’t have that kind of cash flow.
- Your host has to have MySQL (and you need to be able to add tables and such).
- You need to be able to set something to run the script automatically. It’s kind of useless otherwise. I use a cron job. I think there may be web services out there that will do it, but I’m not really sure.
- I have tested this (and am using it) with my own Twitter account. Which has 275 people I’m following. I get enough replies for me to have had written this script, but I woudn’t classify it as a “ton” of replies. Bottom line, it hasn’t been stress tested (although I don’t see where the script would fail–just want to point that out).
- I’m sure it could be written better, with less code, more efficiently, with error checking, bla bla bla… I don’t know at this point if I’ll make it more efficient in the future.
- This script was designed to hit a specific search.twitter.com RSS feed that you define inside the script. It does not hit the Twitter API (which might be more reliable I don’t know).
- While I use it for @Replies, I guess you could use it to track whatever you want. Although at the moment it can only track one feed at a time.
- Use the script at your own risk, don’t sell it, modify if you like. I take no responsibility for anything happening to you good or bad as a result of using this script. If you come up with a cool way to use it I’d love to hear about it.
- If you use it and like it, comment on the site. If you use it and hate it, comment on the site. If you think it can be written better or have improvement ideas, comment on the site. Either way–enjoy.
- The site I got the XML parser from is here. It’s also noted in the script itself in case anyone wants to check that out.
I think that about covers it. I hope you enjoy it and get some use from it. Please comment with any questions.
>> You can download the Twitter Reply script here <<
Thanks for checking it out.
