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Tweetty is a cute, tiny, post-only Twitter client with bitly integration. Use Tweetty if you want an easy way to tweet from your tty (hence the name).

I wrote Tweetty because I got sick of using fancy, graphical twitter client that take the fun out of tweeting. Tweetty puts the "wee" back in tweeting by being brief and concise. Be sure to check out my blog post about Tweetty, for a roundup on the thinking that went behind Tweetty.

How to use?

Download and install Tweetty in a folder where rest of your programs live. Make sure your PATH variable is set appropriately.

Next, you do a one-time setup of .tweettyrc, to make tweeting as easy as it is meant to be. You'll create a file called .tweettyrc in your HOME directory. On Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems, the home directory is generally /home/username.

.tweettyrc will store your Twitter and bitly user/password, so that you don't have to specify those over and over again. Create .tweettyrc and only give yourself permissions to read and write to it. Download a sample .tweettyrc file below, just copy the content below:

$bitly_user = 'bitly_user_id';
$bitly_api_key = 'bity_api_key';
$twitter_user = 'twitter_user';
$twitter_passwd = 'twitter_password';

NOTE: Don't change the order of these values. Or you might see some errors.

To obtain a bitly API key, register at bitly. Just replace the values in .tweettrc to match your account information. If you don't want to use bitly, set the bitly variables to empty strings, like this:

$bitly_user = '';
$bitly_api_key = '';
$twitter_user = 'twitter_user';
$twitter_passwd = 'twitter_password';

To tweet, simply type "tweetty", followed by your status message in quotes. Remember, the quotes are really important!

tweetty "I just downloaded Tweetty from http://tweetty.sourceforge.net #tweetty"

This will result in the following tweet:

I just downloaded Tweetty from http://bit.ly/bmHFhO #tweetty

As you can see, Tweetty automatically converted the URL "http://tweetty.sf.net" to a bilty URL. It will always do that provided you have set up your bitly account details in .tweettyrc. Multiple URLs in the status messasges are fine and will all be converted.

Advanced Usage

If you have multiple Twitter accounts, Tweetty will let you chirp from any of them if you follow these instructions:

1. Keep your most-used account details in your .tweettyrc file. That way you can easily tweet using Tweetty from your most-used account.
2. Let's say you want to use your alternate account for tweeting too. We'll call it "otherid".
3. Copy your .tweettyrc to .tweettyrc-otherid
4. Change the parameters in .tweettyrc-otherid to match your alternate account. Note that you can reuse your bitly account for all your twitter accounts.
5. Create a link to tweetty script called tweetty-otherid
ln -sf /usr/bin/tweetty /usr/bin/tweetty-otherid
6. Now, simply use the new command to tweet
tweetty-otherid "Look Ma! Tweeting from an alternate account"
This will send the tweet from your newly setup alternate account.

You can repeat this procedure to set up Tweetty for as many accounts as you like.

Copyright (c) 2010, Vishal Verma