Shout: At a glance status using Twitter

Inspired by a recent 37 Signals blog post A peek at In/Out, an internal app at 37signals, we decided this would be great for the Litmus team as well. A quick glance overview of what everyone is working on at this moment in time.

Setup

1. Setup your database.yml to point to a valid db
2. Run rake db:migrate to setup the db
3. Add the email address and password of your receiving twitter account to twitter_config.yml. Note: This shouldn’t be your actual twitter account but one you set up specifically to receive direct messages from your team. Don’t use this account for anything else.
4. Set up some users via script/frozen-merb -i and add their twitter screen name so Shout can track their messages
5. Setup a cron job to run script/frozen-merb -r "Message.update_from_twitter" (don’t do this more than every minute for Twitters sake)

Issues

• Need to write some tests!

Feel free to clone and fix any other bugs, we’ll take patches and suggestions although this app is supposed to be very simple so more features are probably unnecessary