twitter2rss

Twitter2RSS

The application will create a RSS feed from a Twitter home timeline.

It was created out of a test project to play around with go.

Build

% make build

If you build on another platform as Linux (e.g. MacOS) and want to copy it to your Linux or FreeBSD server:

% make linux
% make freebsd

Usage

% ./twitter2rss --help
Usage of user-auth:
  -access-secret string
        Twitter Access Secret
  -access-token string
        Twitter Access Token
  -combined-feed
        Combine multiple tweets from the same user into a single RSS entry?
  -combined-feed-hours int
        if combined-tweet, how many hours should be combined together?
  -config string
        Configiguration file
  -consumer-key string
        Twitter Consumer Key
  -consumer-secret string
        Twitter Consumer Secret
  -debug
        Debug
  -max-tweets int
        Maximum tweets per feed

Configuration

You can provide all required configuration from the command line (see Usage).

The required API keys can be received by creating your own Twitter app on https://apps.twitter.com/

Environment variables

% export TWITTER2RSS_CONSUMER_KEY="YOUR_TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY"
% export TWITTER2RSS_CONSUMER_SECRET="YOUR_TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET"
% export TWITTER2RSS_ACCESS_TOKEN="YOUR_TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN"
% export TWITTER2RSS_ACCESS_SECRET="YOUR_TWITTER_ACCESS_SECRET"

Configuration File

See the configuration file twitter.hcl in this repository.

Filters

You can ignore tweets by configuring regex filters.

Source filter

The source filter ignores all tweets based on the client used for a tweet. That is helpful to filter all automatically created tweets from various services such as Foursquare out.

Currently I do not know how to find out the Source string of a tweet without querying the API.

Text filter

The text filter ignores all tweets that match a specific substring in the tweet text.

Note: The tweet text used is not the raw tweet text provided by the Twitter API but the final text after building the entire tweet object together. If there is an URL in a tweet, this filter can also match the summary of the URL.

Combined feeds

Having a lot of tweets and reading them individual can be tiring. As result tweets of the same author can be combined into one tweet with the -combined-feed command line option or by using the configuration file.

To avoid duplicate feeds items feeds are sorted into hour blocks each days. The default is 6 hour blocks (12am-6am, 6am-12pm, 12pm-6pm, 6pm-12am). The most recent hour block will not be created as feed item. As result, if the feed is checked at 3pm, only tweets created before 12pm will be shown. The tweets that are not shown 3pm are shown after 6pm.

You can also define the amount of hours that should be combined together with -combined-feed-hours. Not every value makes sense. Every value over 24 doesn't change the output. 23 would lead to two combined feed entries: 12am-11pm, 11pm-12am. 12 or 24 would be highest reasonable numbers.

LICENSE

Apache License, Version 2.0

Thanks

Thanks to Jon Bodner for helping with go related questions.