Sending messages to Twitter from cURL

I'm quite a fan of web app API's. They allow you to play around with the stuff you use every day from where you like. In this case I'm going to go over how to post to Twitter from the terminal using cURL.

This recently came up on Digg - although in a much more complex manner - so I thought that I would try and greatly simplify what was written there.

The Basics

At it's raw fundamentals, you need to send an HTTP post to the API with your credentials and your message. See the example below.

curl -u user:pass -d status="Message" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

Practically, the command consists of four stages. First there is the app itself, "curl", then the authentication, followed by the message you wish to send and then finally the URL to do the business with.

You need to adjust the authentication part according to your account - otherwise you cannot use it.

The message can be up to 140 characters (obviously), and can have spaces. (Originally, I had posted a single word, but this was due to a typo).

Others

You can also do other things, all of which is outlined in the Twitter API docs and there are also other ways of posting to Twitter, for example this one in PHP.

Next

I feel that this post is a little thin on the ground, but there is only so much that can be written about posting to Twitter from the command line..

Battery Annoyances

The other day my battery decided that it would be a good idea to charge again. For about 15 minutes it charged away nicely - seemingly at last recognising my batteries existence. Then it stopped and hasn't since.

Unfortunately, at the time I was quite busy, so left trying it out till tonight and had the same result that I have been getting for the last week or so. Nothing.

The trouble is, I don't know if it is a battery, charging or seating problem. I'm sure I have eliminated the latter, but I can't be sure. Not until I try another battery.

Earlier on today I popped into the new Apple reseller in Guildford. Too new it seems to stock old model batteries. Quite willing to order one in, but only if I buy one - obviously. That's not a lot of good for someone who doesn't know what the problem actually is.

Plan B

So now, I am somewhat stuffed. I don't know of anyone else with my model MacBook so I can't go and ask them to steal it for a few minutes. So now I hope that the black MB battery is good enough, as I do know someone with one of them. You'd think that having such a specific thing wouldn't be so hard, at least it is better than having to order one and find out that its a deeper problem...

If that doesn't come together, then I will have to go up to London on an evening and go to the Genius bar. I don't have a problem with Apple's support - which seems good - but it doesn't work out to be that convenient for me.

So this forms another chapter in me not being able to use my MacBook as a battery which is quite a shame, as I'm missing it now. Unfortunately it still works out cheaper to get a battery, even with it's £99 price tag...

Traffic Analysis and Marketing Tips

For the last few weeks I have been looking at my site stats and noticed quite a problem. They seem to be going down.

For someone who is trying to build a profile, this isn't so good. A while ago I was getting new visitors of around 50 a week, then it went down to the 30 that I'm getting now. I know this isn't particularly the Huffington Post, but still, I don't like seeing my stats going down.

In regards to SEO, I've taken somewhat a backseat. I haven't put that much effort in trying to market in other ways either. That's probably because I'm not a fan of SEO. I can't stand the idea of forcefully trying to make something viral, but on the other hand, if people don't know about it, it can't be viral.

Marketing campaigns are odd creatures. For blogs advertising isn't usually the key so you need to adjust yourself to another method. For products however it's a completely different animal. I could possibly advertise a product, but not a blog - at least my experiences haven't shown that I can.

Comments

There are of course often done ways to go about blog marketing. I'm quite a fan of Gravitar based comment forms which allow you to place your URL to link your name and whilst it provides a "nofollow" for search engines (they won't see it as a useful link) it does help real people through. If you say something interesting, there is a high chance that they will pop over to your site.

Like I said, I cannot stand SEO, especially tricks to work around it. This is probably a big reason for why there are "nofollow" tags on the links which are put in. The various marketing blogs - ProBlogger included - have comments where there only purpose is to advertise the site back again. It's especially worse when it's blatantly obvious. In this situation your plan will not work and only the very stupid will follow on your links.

I will admit - that comment is hardly the most useful and to some degree I do regret the odd few like that which I have done. I do however feel that authors need to be thanked for their content and insight - especially if there's an error or two which if you're the first person to comment then it's acceptable.

To stop me drifting off into comment "rules", I'm going to move onto Guest Posts. But before I do, I'm going to mention that you shouldn't be paying for these types of comment. It may look like a good return on investment, but in all sincerity you are wasting your time. If you want to gain links, community's will snort you out.

Guest Posts

I've now been writing daily for almost a year. Regretfully I haven't yet guest posted for anyone. To some degree I do not feel that my content is worthwhile which in itself is a problem as a beginner. But second to that, I don't know where to bid for.

With so many interests across the web, it can be rather interesting to work out where you should bid for. Just recently a place where I was wanting to write a post for posted the same idea. If I had gone ahead and written in, I could have gotten an immense profile boost. But I didn't and I didn't get the results.

At the moment I am hunting out for another idea and a site to go with it. There are of course social networks, but they're another animal. Something which I need much more experience with.

Twitter

I still see Twitter as a place to put out my ideas and thoughts as they come in and read others. I'm rather enjoying the small amount of people I follow and in turn I try and push a little bit of marketing through that.

But rather than a marketing tactic - which it really is - I see it more of a reminder to my existence and that I still am blogging.

Future

I will in the future be following this up. Like I say, I am not a great fan of SEO or Marketing tactics, but if you don't market, you can be seen. Guest posts are my next tactic and I will either be linking to them or reposting them here.

Feeds Come and Go

I rarely ever lose items from my feed reader. Mostly more comes, but on the off side, sometimes blogs and news sites are lost.

The BBC's tecnology feed slowly went after too much content, digg went (but came back), engadget went after I realised I wasn't missing anything watching TekZilla on Revision3. Recently however I decided that it was time to get rid of ProBlogger.

That was a mistake an a half.

Regardless, I had about a week or two's worth of content missing but once I re-added it I noticed how much of a gap it left. Although I had grown tired of the same content over and over, the recent content was somewhat different and something that I realised I needed.

Those were just a few but over time I've added and removed a few some that I haven't noticed so much and others that I have.

To some degree you could call it the curse of the feed reader, it's very simple to add more feeds - just difficult to remove them.

The same has happened with me and podcasts, two of them that I listen to which went and then came back. I suppose you could say that it is an attention thing, but once you get started, it's hard to not want to listen to the episodes you "missed".

Obviously, I am always looking out for more - especially audio podcasts - which seem to be rather handy on the move. Which reminds me, at least 58 podcast episodes to either listen or watch...

Windows 7: Usability and Resource Management

After being asked by a friend to take a look at the memory usage I realised that it warranted a second article. In trying to find the task manager (now called "Resource Monitor"), I came across two interesting points.

Usability

It is quite impossible to use the Start Menu compared to every other version of Windows. Traditionally everything would open and fill the screen if you had 300 or so apps installed. It took time to find the right item, but you were used to it. The same goes for Mac OS X, it's just a big folder full of apps rather than a menu. This however is much more complex.

Instead of spreading out across the screen, everything is opened up in the start menu and compressed into the small window. For those moving from XP, this will turn to be quite a learning curve, let alone those who use it all the time, or have the odd app that never use but often need and cannot remember the name of.

I found that scrolling around for the "Resource Monitor" quite a chore. Instead of being able to go directly to it, I had to scroll around and duck in and out of folders. Unlike previous versions I couldn't see everything that was up for offer and in some cases there were empty folders, making searching that much more irritating.

Resource Management

This surprised me. The screenshot below shows memory usage for the default system with just the Resource Monitor running. The actual used amount of ram is 341mb. According to a friend of mine, this is about half of what Vista used which he claimed was just around 600mb.

If this isn't a sign of Microsoft going about their next OS the right way, I do not know what it is. It's a sure sign that they have realised that trying to outspec every other operating system is not the way to go anymore. It's come to a time when (for most people) there isn't a need for a Quad Core 2.66Ghz and a simple Pentium 4 1Ghz (well, equivalent) is quite fine.

It still slows down my MacBook when running virtualised, however XP does exactly the same and reports of MacBook's virtualising as well as the MacBook Pro's are quite often cited.

I am very much impressed of the progress, if the usability could be sorted for "old timers", then it would be a winner.