Way back in the deep and distant past when the Internet was new and Bill Gates thought it was just a passing fad, I remember reading about a Cola vending machine on a University campus that some frivolous young boffins hooked up to the ‘net so that you could check its inventory from anywhere in the world using an old fashioned network command called “finger”. Why? Because they could.
Fast forward to the technologies of the current day and the latest trend of Twitter, and history is repeating itself. In the last week I’ve read about a restaurant that can take orders via Twitter, a bakery tweeting the emergence of fresh loaves from the oven; and, utterly pointless, some guys who created a system which sends a tweet every time their cat enters or exits its cat flap. Why? Well, because they can I guess.
Not wanting to be left out I decided to write some Macro Scheduler code to tweet status updates and monitor replies. Why? Well there might be a good reason for being able to do this – I’m sure someone will have one. Perhaps you have a client who wants you to set up a system to monitor the movement of his cat, process restaurant orders, or your local baker wants an automated fresh-loaf tweeter! But mostly, it’s because we can.
You’ll find the Twitter API documentation here. Here’s the code to Tweet a status update:
Let>username=YOURTWITTERNAME
Let>password=YOURPASSWORD
//Tweet from Macro Scheduler
Let>url=http://%username%:%password%@twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
Let>message=Kitty just left the buildng
HTTPRequest>url,,POST,status=%message%,result
Being serious for a moment I can see how a macro that monitors an application might want to post status updates to Twitter, or a backup script could alert you by Twitter when there’s a problem. It might be a public system, but don’t forget that Twitter profiles can be made private too, and Tweets can be viewed on and sent from your BlackBerry, iPhone, or even by SMS.
The following script sets up a loop which monitors your Twitter stream for “mentions” of your username. This might form the basis of a script which retrieves orders. Perhaps it could listen to Twitter for commands and carry out actions based on what message was sent. Or perhaps you just want a macro which does something when a cat decides to head out for the night. Use your imagination.
Let>username=YOURTWITTERNAME
Let>password=YOURPASSWORD
Let>ini_file=%SCRIPT_DIR%\twit.ini
Let>_delay=30
VBSTART
VBEND
//monitor twitter username "mentions" loop
Label>monitor_loop
Let>url=http://%username%:%password%@twitter.com/statuses/mentions.xml
HTTPRequest>url,,GET,,result
//remove the portion (I don't need it and it avoids distinguishing the text IDs from the user IDs.
RegEx>[^>](.*?),result,0,user_matches,nf,1,,result
//extract all texts
RegEx>(?<=)[^>]*?(?=),result,0,text_matches,num_texts,0
If>num_texts>0
//extract all ids
RegEx>(?<=)[^>]*?(?=),result,0,id_matches,num_ids,0
//get last known
Let>last_known_id=0
IfFileExists>ini_file
ReadIniFile>ini_file,SETTINGS,LAST_ID,last_known_id
Else
WriteLn>ini_file,wlnr,
Endif
//iterate through texts
Let>k=0
Repeat>k
Let>k=k+1
Let>this_id=id_matches_%k%
If>this_id>last_known_id
Let>msg_text=text_matches_%k%
/*
msg_text contains the message
Use your imagination here!
For now we'll show it in a message
*/
MessageModal>msg_text
Endif
Until>k=num_texts
//store last ID
EditIniFile>ini_file,SETTINGS,LAST_ID,id_matches_1
Endif
Wait>_delay
Goto>monitor_loop
The script retrieves the 20 most recent “mentions”. It stores the last seen ID in an INI file so that on the next check it ignores those it has seen before, only retrieving messages with a larger ID number.
This is a quick and dirty solution with no error checking, using RegEx to parse the XML that is returned by the call to Twitter. You may prefer to use the MS XML object as shown here.
Whether this proves useful or completely pointless, I hope you have fun. If you’re using Macro Scheduler with Twitter, please add a comment below to let us know how … and why!
Don’t forget you can follow me on Twitter where I may occassionally say something useful.
