greghochsprung.com

I love Techmeme. I used to use Google Reader and got so busy with school that I got so far behind that it became hopeless for me to catch up. Now, I simply check Techmeme a few times per day (and look at a few of my favorite blogs) and get all the good tech news that I need to know. I started following @techmeme on twitter so that I could see all the top posts through my twitter stream.

But the links that Techmeme’s twitter account posts are links to Techmeme’s site, where you can then click through to the article you’d like to read. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all the links to the articles themselves available from twitter? I thought it would, and that is where @techmemelinks comes in.

I decided to try to basically create an auto-retweeter that would tweet the article and the link directly to the article for all Techmeme top posts. After a few iterations, here is how I’m doing it now:

• I wrote a Python script that runs every five minutes.
• That script accesses Techmeme’s RSS feed and checks whether there are any new articles.
• If there are new articles, I parse through the RSS item for each article to find the direct link and pass that to bit.ly’s API.
• I then create the tweet: the title of the article followed by the link and tweet it straight from my Python script using twitter’s API.

It’s a super short script that I am really proud of. It was so simple, but is quite elegant in my opinion. It really shows how powerful API’s are becoming. The bit.ly and twitter calls are just a few lines apiece. Anyways, if you love Techmeme like me and would like to get the direct links of all top posts in your twitter stream, follow @techmemelinks!