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Meta: The State of SoylentNews and Twitter

posted by on Monday December 18 2017, @08:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the stupid-blue-bird dept.

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

So, apparently around November 5th we stopped posting to Twitter. We didn't find out until around the end of that month and when we did nobody had the time and/or ability to look into why until this past week.

Now how we get our headlines over to Twitter is overly complicated and, frankly, idiotic. It's done by one of our IRC bots pulling headlines from the RSS feed and posting them on Twitter as @SoylentNews. The bot was written back in 2014 with hand-rolled (as opposed to installed via package manager) Python libraries and hasn't been updated since. This was breakage that should absolutely have been expected to happen. Twitter's penchant for arbitrarily changing their unversioned API means you either keep on top of changes or expect things to break for no apparent reason.

Here's the question: do we even care? We can either find someone who's willing to rewrite the bot to a new Twitter library, do it the sane way as either a cron or slashd job, or just say to hell with it since we only have two hundred or so followers on Twitter anyway. What say you, folks?

[TMB Note]: Twitter's who-to-follow algorithms really impressed me this morning when I logged in to manually post this story. How did they know we were all huge @JustinBieber and @BarackObama fans?

[Update]: We're again annoying Twitter users by spreading relative intelligence across their platform of choice. Credit goes to Crash for wisely pointing out that we don't have to code everything ourselves.

 
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Meta: The State of SoylentNews and Twitter | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 128 comments | Search Discussion
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Monday December 18 2017, @12:26PM (12 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 18 2017, @12:26PM (#611355) Journal

    N/T - I'm too lazy to comment on the reason why "I don't care".

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday December 18 2017, @12:31PM (11 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday December 18 2017, @12:31PM (#611356) Homepage Journal

    Because I'm pretty sure what the consensus will be already. I wasn't looking for a majority vote, just wanting to know if enough interest exists to make it worth the effort of writing new code and keeping on top of it this time.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Crash on Monday December 18 2017, @04:31PM (2 children)

      by Crash (1335) on Monday December 18 2017, @04:31PM (#611445)

      It looks like Zapier should solve the problem without utilizing an unmaintainable script.

      https://www.google.com/search?q=post+to+twitter+from+rss+feed [google.com]

      Zapier will watch your RSS feed for new posts. Whenever anything is published, it'll copy the title and link, and publish it on your Twitter account automatically.

      https://zapier.com/apps/rss/integrations/twitter/233/publish-your-rss-feed-to-twitter [zapier.com]

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Monday December 18 2017, @07:45PM

      by edIII (791) on Monday December 18 2017, @07:45PM (#611548)

      We'd be better off with you getting a nice bottle of Whiskey and taking the night off. I was honestly surprised we posted to Twitter at all.

      --
      Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.

    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Monday December 18 2017, @09:43PM (5 children)

      by frojack (1554) on Monday December 18 2017, @09:43PM (#611584) Journal

      I wasn't looking for a majority vote,

      Why not?

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.

      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by insanumingenium on Monday December 18 2017, @10:09PM

        by insanumingenium (4824) on Monday December 18 2017, @10:09PM (#611598) Journal

        Where did TMB give you the idea he was going to be interested in appealing to the masses?

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday December 18 2017, @10:10PM (3 children)

        by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday December 18 2017, @10:10PM (#611599) Homepage Journal

        Because I was asking from a "my time" perspective not a "site direction" one. A morning's coding is worth it to me if even a handful of people are significantly inconvenienced but if literally nobody cared I wasn't going to screw with it.

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @03:12AM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @03:12AM (#611693)
          Yeah. Sometimes it's about serving people not democracy.

    • (Score: 2) by jdavidb on Tuesday December 19 2017, @11:25PM

      by jdavidb (5690) on Tuesday December 19 2017, @11:25PM (#612048) Homepage Journal
      Thanks for bringing SoylentNews back to Twitter. :)
      --
      ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings