A really simple Ruby script to post new blog entries to Twitter
You will need to set up a Twitter Developer Account and create a new App. Once you have your Consumer Keys and Access Tokens, you will need to set up the following environment variables:
- TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY
- TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET
- TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN
- TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET
Pikebot depends on these 4 environment variables to access the Twitter API.
You will also need to change the URL in line 7 to your own blog's feed URL. After that, just symlink Pikebot to your /usr/local/bin/ directory like so: ln -s $PWD/pikebot /usr/local/bin/
Using the command pikebot in the Terminal will run the script, check your blog for new posts, and, if there are any new posts, will post the title and the link to Twitter.
My blog, Personal Development, uses Jekyll on GitHub Pages. While I've configured my local installation of Jekyll to use my own time zone, it appears that GitHub Pages defaults to UTC. You can see that I've specified on line 23 that Pikebot checks the latest blog entry against the current time in UTC. Since I live in EST, that would normally involve a calculation when I'm specifying when the blog post was written. No more!
I've included a script called utcnow that copies the current UTC time, formatted how Jekyll likes it, to your clipboard (if you're on OS X), ready for you to paste into your blog post. To use it, just symlink to your /usr/local/bin/ directory like so: ln -s $PWD/utcnow /usr/local/bin/ and run it by typing utcnow. It will display "Copied!" if everything went as expected.