Twitterise 2.0

The objective of the project is to have a new and diverse timeline. We always follow people similar to us, let's start with new ideas from different people. By default Twitterise follows 5 new people for 5 days.

These numbers are not completely random because we need to deal with the Twitter API rate limits, but it can be much larger. Remember the Twitter following rules and best practices, and the technical follow limits.

Twitterise never follows the same user twice.

Instalation

$ bundle install

You need to create a new Twitter App with read and write permissions to work with the Twitter API. Also it's necessary to create a .env file with the environment variables needed by the Twitter client.

export TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY="YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY"
export TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET="YOUR_CONSUMER_SECRET"
export TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN="YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN"
export TWITTER_ACCESS_SECRET="YOUR_ACCESS_SECRET"

Customization

You can customize the behaviour of Twitterise with some environment variables that you can add to the .env file.

Number of accounts to follow:

export NUMBER_TO_FOLLOW=10

Number of days to follow an account:

export FOLLOW_DURING_DAYS=3

Mute the accounts that Twitterise follows:

export MUTE=true

Language of accounts to follow (based on the Twitter description). Default English. Available languages: Arabic, Danish, Dutch, English, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Pinyin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish:

export LANGUAGES=english,spanish

Usage

Setup the SQLite database, all the information is self-contained under the db directory:

$ bin/setup

Run Twitterise:

$ bin/twitterise

In order to automate the use of Twitterise, it's a good idea to run it once per day. To achieve this, insert a new line in crontab, e.g. every day at 10:00 AM:

$ crontab -e

0 10 * * * export BASH_ENV=/path/to/twitterise/.env; /path/to/ruby /path/to/twitterise/bin/twitterise >> /path/to/twitterise/logs/twitterise.log 2>&1

Everything is a mess, you want to enjoy your Twitter account like at the beginning, no problem:

$ bin/reset

Who made this?

This was made by Arturo Herrero under the MIT License. Find me on Twitter @ArturoHerrero.