RSS Twitter Bot

jnewland (Jesse Newland) — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 04:20:12 GMT

Republish an RSS feed on a twitter account. This was the source I used to run the Woot Twitter Bot before they took it over.



require 'rubygems'

require 'active_record'

require 'simple-rss'

require 'open-uri'

require 'twitter'



#twitter account to post to

twitter_email = "yourtwitteremail@bla.com"

twitter_password = "secret"



#rss feed to post

rss_url = "http://yoursite.com/index.xml"

rss_user_agent = "http://twitter.com/yourbot"



#sqlite db

path_to_sqlite_db = "/PATH/TO/db.sqlite"





ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new(STDERR)

ActiveRecord::Base.colorize_logging = false



ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(

    :adapter => "sqlite3",

    :dbfile  => path_to_sqlite_db

)



#uncomment this section the first time to create the table

#

#ActiveRecord::Schema.define do

#    create_table :item do |table|

#        table.column :title, :string

#        table.column :link, :string

#    end

#end



class Item < ActiveRecord::Base

  def to_s

    "#{self.title[0..(130-self.link.length)]} - #{self.link}"

  end

end



#run the beast

rss_items = SimpleRSS.parse open(rss_url ,"User-Agent" => rss_user_agent)



for item in rss_items.items

  Item.transaction do

    unless existing_item = Item.find(:all, :conditions => ["link=?", item.link]).first

      twitter ||= Twitter::Base.new(twitter_email, twitter_password)

      new_item = Item.create(:title => item.title, :link => item.link) 

      twitter.post(new_item.to_s)

    end

  end

end

Run this once with the lines uncommented to create the DB, then slap it in your crontab.

DZone Snippets: xml code

RSS Twitter Bot