I wanted to play with accessing Twitter via their REST API and there are several Ruby libraries to do that. I picked one that said it had full support (Twitter4r) and tried it out.
First install the Ruby gem for Twitter4r:
sudo gem install twitter4r
or on Windows:
gem install -âversion 1.1.1 json
gem install twitter4r
Then you can access it with a little chunk of code as simple as this:
require('rubygems')
gem('twitter4r', '0.3.0')
require('time')
require('twitter')
client = Twitter::Client.new(:login => 'your Twitter username', :password => 'your Twitter password')
timeline = client.timeline_for(:me)
timeline.each do |status|
puts status.user.screen_name, status.text
end
When I ran that, out popped the last 20 tweets I had done.
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Yeah, it’s similar with PHP. It’s easy, but it creeps me out that in order to do something with Twitter, people have to give you the keys to the kingdom. I auto-post twitter updates from thecodezone.com and I don’t like to store peoples’ passwords (even though I encrypt ’em), but there’s no other way and they’re way overdue for their new system supporting third parties.
I’d much rather have a system like Facebook where I’d store unique key for the user, and the user can grant me permissions to post and can revoke that permission from within their twitter account.