Sessions

Making Twitter Suck Less With Perl

*
Accepted Session
Hacks
Short form
osb2009-0177
Scheduled: Wednesday, June 17, 2009 from 5:00 – 5:45pm in Broadway
Session notes

Excerpt

Spam is starting to infiltrate Twitter and other similar online communities. Learn how to use Perl to filter to garbage from the gold and search for what matters to you.

Description

Many applications are starting to emerge that allow you to slice and dice the Twittersphere, (like Tweetdeck 1 or Yahoo Sideline 2) such as advanced searching and grouping of tweets, posting to multiple accounts, filtering out unwanted tweets from hash tag searches and generally making searching for what you want easier.

Why not use the power of Perl regex’s and the vast CPAN codebase to do as you please? Interested in creating autonomous agents that search for what you are interested in and archiving relevant information? This talk is for you!

As an example, this talk will teach the basics of Net::Twitter3 by explaining how one can write Perl code that watches certain locations (a log file, RSS feed, website, whatever) for given strings of text and depending on which source and string it detects, notifies it’s master via Twitter.
In the case of watching an error log, this can be sending a Direct Message if the error severity is past a threshold or posting a normal tweet on a timeline for more routine events.

Other topics that will be touched upon will include

  • Unify interactions with Twitter/Identi.ca/etc
  • Integrating with Continuous Integration/Smoke Testing
  • Tweetholes – Automagically sending certain spam-like messages to the bit bucket
  • Integration with IRC bots, blogs and RSS feeds
  • Filtering out the same message across networks

1 http://www.tweetdeck.com
2 http://sideline.yahoo.com
3 http://search.cpan.org/dist/Net-Twitter/

Tags

twitter, perl, unsuck

Speaking experience

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Speaker

  • Leto_avatar

    Jonathan Leto

    The Perl Foundation

    Biography

    Jonathan Leto is a Software Developer at Rentrak Corp and the maintainer of several CPAN modules, including Math::GSL, for which he was a mentor in Google Summer of Code 2008. Jonathan is also active in the Parrot Virtual Machine project and Perl 6 on Parrot, aka Rakudo and is currently the organization administrator for The Perl Foundation in Google Summer of Code 2009. Jonathan received a Masters in mathematics from UCF, has published several papers in the field of differential equations and is keenly interested in Open Source scientific computing, especially with dynamic languages.

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