Justin starts a blog

Hacking the Peek into the TwitterPeek

So I know that the standard Peek already has some support for Twitter via PeekApps, but since that’s in closed beta I decided to roll my own. I’ve optimized my setup so that only mentions and DMs come through, and so that replies “just work”.

First I setup a gmail box for my incoming tweets to go to, and then set that up as my peek address. Ok pretty simple so far.

Then I wrote a script called twitterpeek which polls for mentions and DMs, formats them just right for the peek, and forwards them to my special gmail box. This just runs in a cron once every few minutes.

Next I whipped up the converse script, peektwitter. This takes incoming messages sent to a special address, parses them, and forwards them on to Twitter. I take advantage of the way my peek formats replies to include all the pertinent information to send the tweet. This one is a bit trickier to set up, since you’ll need to configure an MTA (I use postfix) to use this as a filter for your special address.

Now I’ve got a nice little Twitter device. Since it’s only sending me mentions and DMs I can turn on the notifications full blast. I’ll continue to do my everyday following via Tweetie, and use this for conversations on the go.