Discovered a emacs mode that lets you twitter within emacs. Quite nice. I'm not sure i support the Twitter stuff, those instant attention deficit babbling, and these days perhaps a majority of twitter traffic is online marketing (aka SEO) bullshit (there are sites that sell twitter followers. Like, $50 gets you a thousand followers.) , but that's all probably because i'm getting old.
Anyway, there are quite a few twitter modes for emacs. The first i tried is TwIt (Twit.el), and it worked well. On the emacswiki , it was mentioned that some of them use http instead of https, so it's a security RISK! That'd be a big one! (just imagine, your gmail password got transmitted in the open; and you'll be damned if the same account is used to access tens of other sites by OpenID.) But the Twit.el package mentioned that they fixed it to use https. I haven't looked into, but it all seems just works and hopefully it's secure.
OK, enough babbling. Here's how to use it. Just download it TwIt (Twit.el), open the file, then 【Alt+x eval-buffer】.
To twit, call “twit-post”, give your login name, password, then tweet away!
To view recent tweets, call “twit-show-recent-tweets”. NICE.
There's quite a few other commands that lets you search and other twitter stuff.
Once you decided you like it, you can install it properly, just follow the simple instructions in the file.
I needed to have queue'd twits. I read that http://cotweet.com/ can do it. It requires a sign up. But am thinking there are several emacs twitter modes. I could easily do queued twit in elisp by some timing/sleep function. This way, i could leverage my elisp expertise, and have full control of twittering. It'd be nice to have emacs as my twitter client, integrated with all the thousands emacs commands, and i don't have to switch to browser/emacs back and forth all day. So i spend a hour to look at twitter modes again.
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TwIt
Twit.el
;; Copyright (c) 2007 Theron Tlax ;; (c) 2008-2009 Jonathan Arkell ;; (c) 2010 Dave Kerschner (docgnome) ;; Author: thorne <thorne@timbral.net>, jonnay <jonnay@jonnay.net>, docgnome <docgnome@gmail.com>
Note: works out of the box. But all's commands based. ⁖ To twit, do “twit-post”, to view do “twit-show-recent-tweets”. Doesn't seems to be a major/minor mode that you can look at all the keybindings and menu. No avatar icon by default. No documentation.
Useful if all you need is simple tweets now and then, and get tweets as text.
Spend some 30 min on this today.
twittering-mode.el
;; Author: Y. Hayamizu ;; Tsuyoshi CHO ;; Alberto Garcia
Note: does not work on Windows out of the box. You get the error: “Authorization via OAuth failed. Type M-x twit to retry.” No documentation whatsoever. Emacs wiki is not helpful, half of it is bunch of random chats as usual.
http://github.com/xwl/twittering-mode
It's a fork. Dunno why or what's the diff. Have not tried.
All pretty much sucks major. None can be a good replacement for official twiter web based interface. Quite far from it. But if you have several hours to spend with it, and know emacs or even elisp, then it would be advantageous. (the situation here is analogous to Linux.)
Fixing the problem brushed my mind. It shouldn't be difficult to write a twitter client. However, emacs elisp the language and culture has lots of problems. There's no coherent structure or lib to do http, no doc or guide or anything remotely like that. If you need to do http, each person hacks his own by whatever methods they come up with, or try to grope existing hacks. You'll spend perhaps a week just to find out what's there, what's usable, etc, for some simple http POST or some auth stuff.
With same amount of time to do this, it'd be actually easier, to develope a fully commercialized, ajax based, browser based twitter client. The potential users will be one million times larger, and you can easily monetize it if you get a lot users.
The whole situation reminds me of my previous experience: A Emacs Frustration (Blogger package)