Net::Twitter Cookbook: How I tweet, plus

Previously, I wrote a post showing the basics on how to send a tweet using Perl and Net::Twitter. I showed the easiest you can do it.

Below is the code that I use most often. It is a command-line tool, where it's used something along the lines of named_twitter.pl jacobydave text of my tweet. Except, that's not how I type it, thanks to my .alias file. I have twitter aliased to '~/bin/named_twitter jacobydave ' and normally tweet like twitter this is how I tweet.

This isn't to say I never automate tweets; I certainly do. But it is a rare part of what I do with the Twitter API and Net::Twitter. I will dive deeper into issues with tweeting and direct messages, both in a technical and social matter, in a later post.

But I said that you have the consumer key and secret, which identify you as a service, and the access token and secret, which identify you as a user of the service. In the above code sample, I use YAML to store this data, but you could use JSON, Sqlite or anything else to store it. Among other benefits, you can put your code into GitHub, as I did above, without exposing anything.

As I proceed, I will assume that tokens are handled somehow and proceed directly to the cool part.

Again, you get the consumer key by going to apps.twitter.com and creating a new app.

You log into apps.twitter.com with your Twitter account, click "Create New App" and fill in the details. When I created my three, you had to specifically choose "can send DMs" specifically, so if you're creating apps to follow along, I do suggest you allow yourself that option.