Author Topic: Alias: Send Twitter updates from Farr (Read 64467 times)

lanux128 · « **on:** September 10, 2008, 12:18 AM »

this is an alias to send updates to your Twitter page from Farr. in addition you can also send a 'direct message' and perform a search at Twitter.com which is being touted as a real-time search. This latest update allows users to key-in accented characters without any problems, thanks to mouser & ak_.

usage info
first of all, the latest version of Farr is needed (download from here). once installed, download the twitter alias (click on twitter-farr.zip) and extract the contents into Farr's sub-folder '\AliasGroups\Installed'. If you had installed the previous version at '\AliasGroups\MyCustom', then please delete the alias.

now launch Farr then go to the 'Options' > 'User Variables' (see pic). you will see that there is already an entry for TwitterPlugin. here you can enter your username and password. Click 'Ok' to close then type 'tw' to use the Twitter alias.

this alias can also be updated via DCUpdater. so if you already have DCUpdater, then you can update within the program itself.

btw, this alias uses cURL and the Twitter icon from Fasticon.com and i would like to thank both teams for making this tool and design available.

Edit: updated the download link, thanks to TucknDar.

mouser · « **Reply #1 on:** September 10, 2008, 12:36 AM »

wonderful

lanux128 · « **Reply #2 on:** September 23, 2008, 09:35 AM »

i've updated the alias so that 'direct messages' can be sent direct from Farr (pun intended).

i'll post it tomorrow after some further testing.

lanux128 · « **Reply #3 on:** October 09, 2008, 12:55 AM »

i've updated the twitter alias. see the top post for further info.

hejer · « **Reply #4 on:** November 21, 2008, 04:17 PM »

i started to use this but japanese words don't work.when I type japanese it shows correctly on the bar but it doesn't not show correctly on twitter website.it like this" •\Ž¦‚³‚ê‚̂͂¿‚á‚Ƃµ‚½“ú‚µ‚©‚µtwitterゾ‚ƕ¶Žš‰»‚¯‚·‚é‚ł·A‚ǂ¤‚µ‚܂µ‚傤I "i think this tool is great so i hope this can be ok for japanese.

lanux128 · « **Reply #5 on:** November 21, 2008, 07:40 PM »

i was not aware of the non-compliance with Unicode characters, i'll try to find out why it doesn't work.

ak_ · « **Reply #6 on:** May 11, 2009, 11:25 AM »

Sorry for bringing up this old topic but i also have problems with this. Most of my twits are in french and accented characters (é è ê) don't show up. It's a shame because when i started using Twitter i thought that FARR would be the ideal way of writing new messages

Maybe there's an option in curl.exe to use UTF-8 or something ?

lanux128 · « **Reply #7 on:** May 11, 2009, 08:20 PM »

thanks for trying out this alias. i'm not sure why but i couldn't type accented chars in Farr (i'm using US international keyboard). i tried the same characters at Twitter and they appear fine so the problem is in sending them to Twitter. btw, can you type the accented characters within Farr? is yes, please let me know what keyboard layout are you using?

maybe you can help me with this..

mouser · « **Reply #8 on:** May 11, 2009, 08:34 PM »

this may be a fault in farr, but maybe something i can fix?

lanux128 · « **Reply #9 on:** May 11, 2009, 09:06 PM »

thanks mouser, i've been doing some tests and it seems that if i can type into the Farr's search bar then it will appear properly at the website but it's not the same for everyone it seems.

e.g. i can type into Farr this character 'ç' but not á à é è í ì etc even though they work elsewhere on my PC (e.g. Wordpad). $:-\$

lanux128 · « **Reply #10 on:** May 11, 2009, 09:08 PM »

for the record, i hardly use accented characters in Farr since i have no files that use them.

ak_ · « **Reply #11 on:** May 12, 2009, 09:15 AM »

Damn, looks like i wrote my answer and forgot to post it

To answer your question Lanux, i can write accented characters into FARR and my keyboard layout is a french AZERTY.

When i tried using the Twitter alias, something like this happened : i wrote "rédige un Twit accentué" and the result was "a___k r un Twit accentu".

I think the problem might come from curl.exe (i think you use it to send request) because i remember using to update a remote txt file and having accent problems too.

lanux128 · « **Reply #12 on:** May 12, 2009, 07:42 PM »

yes, curl.exe is used to send the updates so i tried on a console window to see curl's output using this command:

curl.exe --basic --user <username>:<password> --data status="<type here>" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

i typed "test - rédige un Twit accentué" and here's the partial output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<status>
<created_at>Wed May 13 00:32:59 +0000 2009</created_at>
<id>xxxxxxxxxx</id>
<text>test - redige un Twit accentue</text>
…
-output

the encoding is set to "UTF-8", though the accents are dropped. i can't figure out this one yet, please let me know if you find out why this happens. in the meantime, i may have to look into curl's manual.

lanux128 · « **Reply #13 on:** May 17, 2009, 08:17 PM »

thanks to mouser and ak_, this latest update of Twitter alias will work with accented characters (see pic). do give it a try and send me some feedback.

P.S. download link on the 1st post.

Perry Mowbray · « **Reply #14 on:** May 19, 2009, 10:06 AM »

When my alias updated via dcUpdater it was unpacked into a sub-directory of the original:
C:\Program Files\FindAndRunRobot\AliasGroups\Installed\twitter\twitter

Does that mean your zip package was zipped at the directory level? $:-\$

lanux128 · « **Reply #15 on:** May 19, 2009, 08:04 PM »

hmm.. that was a oops upload, please delete the sub-folder and try again..

Perry Mowbray · « **Reply #16 on:** May 20, 2009, 06:31 AM »

hmm.. that was a oops upload, please delete the sub-folder and try again..
-lanux128 (May 19, 2009, 08:04 PM)

Sorry: same again... I've just copied the new downloaded folder over the top of the old one.

lanux128 · « **Reply #17 on:** May 20, 2009, 09:39 AM »

that's strange, i have to take another look at the .dcupdate file to see what's wrong. will keep you posted.

Perry Mowbray · « **Reply #18 on:** May 20, 2009, 09:58 AM »

No forget it. I was just about to say something about setting the InstallDirectory, but when I just looked in the new version, it was set. So I think I was using your old one not the new one

Just to make sure I changed the version and tried again: all OK

lanux128 · « **Reply #19 on:** May 20, 2009, 10:07 AM »

i discussed this with mouser and he suggested that i include the 'InstallDirectory' keyword as to extract into the correct folder. anyway i guess there is nothing wrong with the .dcupdate file since everything is fine now ..

Nod5 · « **Reply #20 on:** May 21, 2009, 07:24 AM »

Great plugin. After browsing through the alias source file I am amazed how minimal it is. I'm not familiar with curl. Do you think a plugin that interacts with google services (calendar, spreadsheets and so on) could be as straight forward to to make?

edit: found the page "using cURL to interact with Google data services ": http://code.google.c...swer.py?answer=78451 . That looks much more complex

lanux128 · « **Reply #21 on:** May 21, 2009, 11:05 PM »

thanks Nod5. the alias looks simple is because twitter uses 'basic' authentication where we can pass the username & password as part of the url. however due to privacy concerns, they are moving to OpenAuth very soon.

anyway to answer your question, i noticed that any method that we use must be able to deal with the response from websites. from what i've seen so far, in these situations curl is usually called from a php script. that is the most common example that i come across when i was googling.

on the other hand, ecaradec's javascript SDK is a good option, which reminds of the google currency converter that you wrote recently. maybe you can work out something like that?

Nod5 · « **Reply #22 on:** May 22, 2009, 05:03 AM »

Well the currency converter was much simpler since it didn't require authentication. For authentication we need something like cURL, right? But maybe you meant a javascript plugin that in turn uses cURL. I do hope to make some plugin later this summer. But I'm really not good with javascript and this curl stuff looks pretty complex. And I haven't followed the FScript development closely. It seems to have evolved a lot over time, just like FARR has so I have a lot of catching up do to.

lanux128 · « **Reply #23 on:** May 22, 2009, 10:32 PM »

in a discussion in the chat-room about the latest framework to write plugins, mouser suggested Fsubscript which seems to be a better iteration of FScript so that might be a start.

as for authentication, some of the plugins do handle authentication but i'm not sure how. maybe ecaradec's Delicious plugin can be give us a clue.

PS. i also noticed your plugin wiki request and i believe that with such tutorials, things will be much smoother.

Nod5 · « **Reply #24 on:** May 23, 2009, 06:04 AM »

Right, I knew about Fsubscript but just didn't have it fresh in memory when I posted earler. I'm continuing this discussion in the other thread:
"idea: FARR plugin school / tutorial / wiki" https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=18431.0