software Archive at The Aptly Named, Sam’s Blog

September 28, 2008 No comments

ff2tweet

I got sick of reposting to Twitter what I had just posted to FriendFeed. I was doing that to enable conversations in both networks. I tried twitterfeed and Yahoo! Pipes, before deciding to just write a tool to do exactly what I wanted.

ff2tweet is a tool to convert a FriendFeed post into a tweet and post it to Twitter. It does so while ensuring that the tweet is within the character limit and incorporates any comment made by the user when posting on FriendFeed. It also inspects the link in the post to shorten and add to the tweet as necessary.

ff2tweet is written in Python and I run it as a cron job on a server. It uses the FriendFeed and Twitter APIs to accomplish its task. It does what I wanted to do but it is a quick hack and there is definitely room for improvement. All feedback appreciated. The code is available on github. Join in!

I’m on FriendFeed at http://friendfeed.com/samgrover and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/samgrover.

New version of LazyEngine

About three months after its initial launch, I’m happy to announce a new version of LazyEngine. I have moved it off my domain and onto the recently launched Google App Engine. This involved a rewrite of the code from the original PHP into the new Python version. This does not mean that it is any less lazy
I had wanted to add a feature to remember a user’s past searches but was too lazy to implement that in PHP. With the new version, I get user logins automatically. You can use your Google accounts to log into LazyEngine and have it remember your searches from visit to visit. Give it a shot right now at http://lazyengine.appspot.com/. Enjoy!

Announcing LazyEngine

LazyEngine is a lazy search engine. If you want to do a search, consider for a moment if you need the results immediately. If not, then this is the search engine for you. This is probably a silly web application.

That’s the idea behind my new web app LazyEngine. Give it a shot. I hope you like it.