Mike's Notes

So in the past I’d used Twitter4J to work with twitter, and it had proved to be very simple, and just work.

For example the give a userid and password for twitter I could just write code as follows to do an update.

Twitter twitter = new Twitter(twitterID,twitterPassword);
twitter.setSource(“mikewarrenstwitterprogram”);

Status status = twitter.update( responseString );

Seems things have moved on, and there’s a whole load of configuration required to be able to authenticate programatically with Twitter. I’m not sure why exactly, because if I use a twitter client all I need to give it is username and password, but I’m sure there’s a good reason  … just need to find out how and why, which means what I thought would be a 10 minute bit of work will be as long as a piece of string – that’s computing for you.

Looks like I need to start with https://dev.twitter.com/docs/auth

Update 22/09/2011:

Just a quick note to say I got it working after jumping though a couple of hoops, using Twitter4J still, but you’re now forced to use OAuth to interact with Twitter.  Basically you need to authorise your app with the account you want to post to, and then set up access tokens and secrets etc. I’ll write it up as a nice “how to” blog post when I get round to it.

Well almost, I want to make a tweak or two before I make it available for use , but the work I originally listed back in April is done

• Switch to use the live DB currently being used by the PHP app. – DONE
• Make links automatically out of URLs in messages – DONE
• Clean up html so it looks presentable (this could be a big one) – DONE
• Either set up email notifications, or some alternative, e.g. posts to twitter – DONE

I mainly want to change the URL that it’s using so that once it starts being used people can favourite a URL and not have it change a week later. Also although I’ve got email notifications, I’d like to add twitter posting as I know that’s pretty easy, and gives some advantage from a user’s point of view to the new version.

I’ve been tinkering with adding facebook “like” and google “plus 1”, but easy to do for the whole page, but not working for me when I try to make them refer to an individual post, so that’s another thing to add to the list.

Part of me can’t quite believe that it’s taken so long, but then it has been the just the odd bit of time here and there in between working, sleeping, and various recreational activitities, so part of me is pretty pleased to have done it. Blogging has be useful as a reminder of what progress I’ve made – important when it’s so slow, and also an incentive to at least try and do something every week or two.I intend to continue, documenting adding various features, refactoring and maybe trying out different languages/frameworks, keeping a low threshold on quality of what I write in the hope that will mean I do actually post something.

Now I can treat myself to a waterproof camera housing, although having spent this long I’m not sure how much I really want one …