Twit: Now with pattern searches (Shallow Thoughts)

Twit: Now with pattern searches

During OSCON a couple of weeks ago, I kept wishing I could do Twitter searches for a pattern like #oscon in a cleaner way than keeping a tab open in Firefox where I periodically hit Refresh.

Python-twitter doesn't support searches, alas, though it is part of the Twitter API. There's an experimental branch of python-twitter with searching, but I couldn't get it to work. But it turns out Gwibber is also written in Python, and I was able to lift some JSON code from Gwibber to implement a search. (Gwibber itself, alas, doesn't work for me: it bombs out looking for the Gnome keyring. Too bad, looks like it might be a decent client.)

I hacked up a "search for OSCON" program and used it a little during the week of the conference, then got home and absorbed in catching up and preparing for next week's GetSET summer camp, where I'm running an astronomy workshop and a Javascript workshop for high school girls. That's been keeping me frazzled, but I found a little time last night to clean up the search code and release Twit 0.3 with search and a few other new command-line arguments.

No big deal, but it was nice to take a hacking break from all this workshop coordinating. I'm definitely happier program than I am organizing events, that's for sure.

Tags: twitter, python, programming
[ 18:23 Aug 03, 2009    More programming | permalink to this entry | ]