Cross post Twitter to StatusNet with StatusNet Tools

A few weeks back I created a little plugin that works with Alex King’s Twitter Tools, using an API it provides to also post your notices to a StatusNet instance (Identi.ca, Twit.tv, etc).

You can find that plugin here: Twitter Tools StatusNet (and should be able to find it soon on wordpress.org).

What I hadn’t realized at the time was just how Twitter Tools itself worked, and what that meant about the StatusNet plugin.

Twitter Tools follows all of your tweets, not just those which you enter via WordPress or generate as new blog post notifications. What this means is that using Twitter Tools in combination with the StatusNet plugin, everything you post on Twitter gets also posted to the StatusNet instance you’ve configured.

Everything you post on Twitter, regardless of it’s source: desktop client, SMS, web client, etc.

This means you’ve got to be careful. If you use Identi.ca, for example, and have your Identi.ca account configured to cross post to Twitter (which is a popular option) you’ll create a loop. You post to Identi.ca, which cross posts to Twitter, where Twitter Tools finds it and (with my plugin in place) cross posts to Identi.ca, which cross posts to Twitter, and so on (repeat until someone tells you your account has gone crazy).
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New WordPress plugin: Twitter Tools – StatusNet

When Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin was in its 1.x days, I published some directions on how to change the API endpoints to point to Identi.ca.

Now that Twitter Tools is at 2.x, Alex has provided an API for enabling additional posting.

So I wrote a plugin for his plugin: Twitter Tools – StatusNet.

It leverages the API he provided to post your tweets (on new blog post creation or via the sidebar form) to a StatusNet instance (default is Identi.ca but it can be easily changed to another). (In case you missed the announcement, the software formerly known as Laconica, which powers Identi.ca but also other sites, is now known as StatusNet).

Given that many StatusNet instances also already cross-post to Twitter, my plugin enables you to suppress the actual posting to Twitter that Twitter Tools does. (You can have notices posted to both Twitter and your StatusNet instance, or just your StatusNet instance without Twitter).

What it doesn’t do is provide all the functionality Twitter Tools provides – digests of your notices, a sidebar widget containing latest notices. If you cross-post to twitter you can use all that functionality from Twitter Tools natively.

If you’d like to replace Twitter throughout Twitter Tools with your favorite StatusNet instance, you can hack away at Alex’s plugin directly – the same basic concepts I outlined before would still apply.

Identi.ca Tools 1.6

Alex King’s excellent WordPress plugin, Twitter Tools, has been released in a 1.6 version.

As described in this earlier post, I’ve modified Twitter Tools to use Identi.ca endpoints rather than Twitter ones, since I have my Identi.ca account set to auto-cross-post to Twitter.

Here’s a revised version of what I’m calling Identi.ca tools – just replace the twitter-tools.php from the 1.6 release with this one (rename it from twitter-tools.php.txt to twitter-tools.php of course) and you should be good to go:

twitter-tools.php.txt

What’s your bug #1?

Evan Prodromou recently asked the following on the laconica-dev list:

So, Ubuntu has a pretty famous Bug #1:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
The title is “Microsoft has a majority market share”. I think it’s a great part of the Ubuntu culture, because it focuses people on what they want to do with Ubuntu.

Our bug #1, by the way, is “/doc/contact”.
http://laconi.ca/trac/ticket/1
Since this was long-ago fixed, I’d like to wipe this ticket* and replace it with an overall project purpose, like Ubuntu’s. But what would the bug be?

It got me thinking – and not just about Identi.ca and open microblogging as a federated, distributed alternative to centralized approaches like Twitter.

Moose and Squirrel - photo by Paul Lannuier.

Identi.ca Tools

Alex King’s Twitter Tools is a great little WordPress plugin for integrating your Twitter presence with your blog. It can show your latest tweets in a sidebar widget, create a “digest” post daily / weekly with a list of your tweets, and announce your blog posts to your twitter account.

In this post I’ll show you what changes are necessary to make it work with identi.ca instead of Twitter.

Why would you want to do that?
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