Howto extract all followers from twitter into list of RSS feeds

I had this idea to use build a real distributed microblogger system a while ago. Unfortunately I was a little bit to late and twitter lost so many links between users (follow and followers) this night. But better now then never. I will post here from time to time parts of the pig picture how to build such a system. This time how to extract the list of friends from your Twitter account and generate a list of RSS feeds out of it.

Twitter has a cool API wich we can use legally. The xml list of users you follow can be retrieved with

http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/USERNAME.xml?lite=true&page=1..n (for me its ansi)

Having at the moment 112 user I follow (yesterday more then 160. ) page 1 and 2 are all my guys.

This small xsl stylesheet extracts the userids. (if anyone is into xsl please help me here. Would be great to extract username, realname and user with comma separated per line. Please add comments if you know the solution, I appreciate it!)

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
 <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

 <xsl:template match="/users/user">
     <xsl:for-each select="id">
      <xsl:value-of select="." />
      <xsl:text>&#10;</xsl:text>
     </xsl:for-each>
 </xsl:template>

Save this code snip to a file called extractIDs.xslt and call it with the processor:

xsltproc extractIDs.xslt friendsPage1.xml  | sed 1d >list_of_ids.txt

xsltproc extractIDs.xslt friendsPage2.xml  | sed 1d >>list_of_ids.txt

So now next step howto get the rss feeds out of it. The API offers this call

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/USERID.atom

Short bashscript like

 for i in `cat list_of_ids.txt`

 do

  echo "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/$i.atom" >>list_of_rrs_feeds.txt

 done

is doing the job. So we end up with a text file each line with one RSS feed. I totally agree its much easier at the moment to call the “user and friend” rss feed from twitter but the idea behind this is to get a list of each user so future systems can really be distributed among many microblogging systems.

Posted in Gutenberg2.0 | No Comments »

Howto Setup Ubuntu postfix to send email with 1und1 as smarthost

Installing Postfix with

apt-get install postfix

or choose dpkg-reconfigure postfix when you allready installed postfix before.

The configuration working for me is “satelite”.

1. System Mail Name: your maildomain name (interblc.com) not the dns name of your server.
2. SMTP relay host:smtp.1und1.de
3. Root and Postmaster mail recipient: your user account or external email address
4. Other destinations to accept mail for: your servername, localhost.localdomain,localhost
5. Force synchronous updates on mail queue: If you have ext3 oder reiser NO otherwise better YES
6. Local Networks: 127.0.0.0/8 [::ffff:127.0.0.0]/104 [::1]/128
7. Procmail for local delivery: Yes
8. Mailbox size limit: 0
9. Local address extension character: +
10. Internet Protocol:All

Edit /etc/postfix/main.cf and add these lines at the end:

smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_password

Create /etc/postfox/sasl_password with one line:

smtp.1und1.de MAILACCOUNT_at_1und1:PASSWD

Create and db file from this passwd file with

postmap /etc/postfix/sasl_password

Restart postfix with:

/etc/init.d/postfix restart
Now it should work. Give it a try with

date | mail -s “testing” regen@wetter.de

and watch the logfile with

tail -f /var/log/mail.log

Posted in System | 5 Comments »

Shift Happens

Moin

One of the best Videos for explaining the shift is from the “Did you know” or “Shift Happens” page from Karl Fisch. More information you can find here.

Posted in Gutenberg2.0 | No Comments »

Howto set up your own twitter

So first serious blog entry. I try to install my own instance of identi.ca what is microblogging system. Its based on Laconica. Lets see how to install this system on Ubuntu Server Edition. l.m.orchard has compiled an outstanding description see DECAFBAD.

Additionally a changed something so here are the description for the latest greatest version. I do not repeat his description only point out the changes.

There is a new version of the xmpPHP library available at least a new release candidate.

http://xmpphp.googlecode.com/files/xmpphp-0.1beta-r50.tar.gz

Beside

 cp xmpphp/*.php ../extlib/

also

cp -R xmpphp/XMPPHP ../extlib/

to copy the necessary libraries.
In order to convince apache2 to accept the rewrite it is neccessary to activate the rewrite module with

a2enmod rewrite

/etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

The XMPP Part is still not running but I try this tomorrow.

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Ansis World is now open

Moin

Sodale, after a long time my colleagues convinced me to start a blog. Wordpress is now up and running. Lets see what I will write here.

Posted in System | 4 Comments »