With my Tweetfave project finally launched and starting to get a little bit of usage, I thought I’d summarize some of the key building blocks for this project.
First of all, what does Tweetfave actually do? It periodically checks your Twitter account to look for new tweets you have marked as favorite. If you have any new ones, it sends them to your email inbox. The functionality is very simple, but I’ve found it to be a handy addition to Twitter, turning favorites into a sort of “read it later” bookmarking feature.
Following are some of the software tools and services I used to build Tweetfave…
Tweetfave is a free service to help you get more out of Twitter favorites. Tweetfave monitors your Twitter feed and sends the tweets you mark as favorite to your inbox. I built Tweetfave for myself (“scratching my own itch”) and it’s really helped me track and remember interesting tweets and links. It’s especially useful when reading my Twitter feed on a mobile phone. If I don’t have the time (or patience) to read linked articles on the phone, I’ll mark the tweet as a favorite, knowing it will arrive later in my inbox.
For the past 10+ years I have hosted this website and my other side projects through pair Networks. I’m also managing all of my domain names through the sister company pairNIC. As of today (2 more domains registered!) I have 17 domain names, 7 of which have live websites. The rest are on my “todo” project list. I’ve been very happy with pair, both on price and support. If you have a need for either web hosting or domain name registration, you should consider pair. If you use these links I’ll get a small referral which helps pay the bills.…
As part of my Tweetfave project, I wanted to get a better sense of the people I’m following and whether they use the Twitter “favorites” feature. By using the Twitter API, I’m able to first fetch my list of friends (i.e. people I am following), then get the detailed stats for each one. The result is a CSV file which can imported into Excel or other spreadsheet program: Twitter friend data loaded in Excel This script is written in PHP and uses the Twitter OAuth PHP library. It uses the Twitter API methods friends/ids and users/lookup. Because the user lookup…
Some email clients like Thunderbird will sometimes show a scam warning message on emails which appear to be normal and not suspicious. The Thunderbird warning is two-part: first an inline message “This message may be a scam, and second a modal dialog which appears when you click on any link in the email. Combined this could be worrisome for users who aren’t sure what the warning means. I’ve been seeing this more frequently lately with email newsletters. The most common cause is link tracking added by the newsletter delivery vendor (MailChimp, Tinyletter, etc.). The scam warning will come up whenever…