• Twitnews update

    February 15th, 2010

    Sometime back I posted an applescript to tweet news items in NetNewsWire to your twitter followers and seems like many people found it useful. I’m really glad that I could find some time today to make a few updates on the script.

    New features

    • Twitnews now saves your twitter login details to the keychain itself. The old script needed you to save your twitter login credentials to the system keychain manually. Now, it checks for the twitnews key in your keychain and if it does not exist, asks you for them and creates the key for you.
    • Growl support.
    • Checks character count is within 140 characters.
    • Uses Tr.im URL shortener so that you can use Tr.im analytics feature if you use it.

    I would however like to use Usable Keychain Scripting by Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software, considering the problems faced by some users, which I blame Apple for their really bad implementation of Keychain Scripting. I tried using Daniel’s scripting definition but could not get it to work, probably it is not updated for Snow Leopard. I’m not sure about this, so if you have suggestions on how I can improve the script, please leave your comments.

    Please download it here.

    Usage

    Unzip and drop it into ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/Scripts. Now you can access the script from the scripts menu on NetNewsWire.

    If you would like to assign a keyboard shortcut to the script, check this post.

    What else ?

    The script has been tested on 10.5 and 10.6, but still if you find it buggy, please let me know in the comments. Otherwise, I hope you find it useful.

    The code is available at Github.

    UPDATE: If you’d prefer to use Bit.ly URL shortener, the script has been updated by Sean to use Bit.ly for click tracking.

    UPDATE: Tr.im has been shut down :( Please see this post for an updated script.

    Tags: , , , ,

    This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 12:55 am and is filed under AppleScript, Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


    8 Responses to “Twitnews update”

    1. Radioactive Knitting: Ravelympics Day 2 | Biochemical Engineering Addict Says:
      February 15th, 2010 at 10:11 am

      [...] Twitnews update | making things work [...]

    2. Patrix Says:
      February 15th, 2010 at 9:48 pm

      Thanks. It works perfectly. But I replaced tr.im with the original is.gd URl shortener script because tr.im has been experiencing lot of downtime recently.

      How do I locate the corresponding script for bit.ly? Since bit.ly seems to be fast becoming the dominant player and has lesser chance of going down.

    3. Tinu Cleatus Says:
      February 15th, 2010 at 10:28 pm

      @Patrix, Thanks for trying it out. I just had a look at bit.ly API and seems there is no simple API call like Tr.im or Is.gd. Looks like the script will have to handle JSON or XML response from the API. Not sure if it is worth it.

      Here is the API doc if you want to try it out:
      http://code.google.com/p/bitly-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation#/shorten

      Anyone else want to go back to Is.gd please see this changeset:
      http://github.com/hackedunit/twitnews/commit/9471d9e9ab943cb52e9948a81ea0782a4a4ad39c

    4. Patrix Says:
      February 20th, 2010 at 2:08 am

      Ah! If only I could understand how to work those API docs :)

      If you ever get around to including bit.ly as a option, let me know. Bit.ly now has analytics features too and I use it on my desktop apps.

    5. sean808080 Says:
      March 5th, 2010 at 6:54 am

      hey tinu

      I modified your twitnews to use bit.ly authentication and history.

      works pretty well and it’s nice to see the news items tweeted then showing in my bit.ly history for click tracking.

      my version is available on your github repo as well as on my site:

      TweetIt from NetNewsWire now using Bit.ly – sean808080′s ohmbase http://bit.ly/9u2K5k

      cheers

    6. Patrix Says:
      March 12th, 2010 at 6:43 am

      Is it just me or has the script stopped working? All I get is the first word of the tweet in my timeline. It was working fine a week ago. Did Twitter change something?

    7. sean808080 Says:
      March 12th, 2010 at 8:10 pm

      not sure what’s up with the old script but my script to tweet to bit.ly still works:

      http://sean808080.posterous.com/tweetit-from-netnewswire-now-using-bitly

    8. How to Post Links to Twittter from Netnewswire | Robin Malau Dot Com Says:
      March 30th, 2010 at 10:13 pm

      [...] March 30, 2010: After updated version that uses Tr.im, there’s a version that uses Bit.ly here. [...]

    Leave a Reply