I use Twitter. I don’t really post much, but I do like to dip in and hear what my friends are doing. Yammer is like a private Twitter for companies. We have just had a network set up for the BBC, which is interesting. Again, I like the idea of posting what I am doing and dipping into what other people are doing around the organisation.
So you can see my problem, I’m doubling up here a bit. When I post something to Twitter, and I think it would be relevant for work too, I don’t want to have to open a different interface and post it again. Now there are services like ping.fm which will sync every site you belong to, but I what to decide what gets posted at work and what doesn’t in this instance. The simple answer is to build something that looks at my Twitter feed and if it sees anything new, then posts it off to Yammer. My friend Mr Humfrey does that very thing. I wanted more than this though, I wanted to filter, plus I wanted to make it easy to use, so I have written this very simple app that does the job:
- Read my Twitter feed every n minutes for changes
- Keep messages with my chosen keyword
- Remove keyword, and send off to Yammer
Twammer usage:
# Display help ./twammer -h # check Twitter messages with last 5 mins (default) # filter by #bbc but don't send anything to Yammer ./twammer -t 47983 -u user -p pass -f bbc -q # check Twitter messages within last 10 mins # send anything to Yammer. Show output ./twammer -t 47983 -u user -p pass -d 10 -v
This is designed to be run as a cron job. You must also make sure you run it at the same interval as the –delay in the app. Here’s what my crontab looks like:
0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /home/duncan/bin/twammer -t 47983 -u user -p pass -f bbc > /dev/null
[UPDATE] Changed to using the correct API instead of scraping the RSS
