Twitter two year ago (t2ya) - by dual

April 6, 2009

Twitter was born March 21, 2006.  I got on Twitter March 28, 2007.  Inspired by
these anniversaries and Tweetbook [1], I thought it interesting to use Twitter
to revisit my life at a medium distance, two years later.  Not too soon to be
recent and not so far as to be nostalgic.

Quite simple, I decided to use Perl and at along with the Twitter REST API.
The most difficult part was dealing with special characters, thanks to
Date::Calc and estimating Daylight Saving Time.

First I grabbed my tweets.  There were fifty pages for the two years of '07 to
'09.

$ for i in $(seq 1 99); do curl -u user:pass http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml?page=$i > tweet_$i; sleep 1; done

Then I dumped a page to see what XML::Simple was dealing.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use XML::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;

my $xml = shift or die;
my $tweets = XMLin($xml);
print Dumper($tweets);

Then it was writing the meat, t2ya.pl, running it on the raw data and letting
at do its thing.

$ for i in raw/*; do perl t2ya.pl $i >> temp; done && tac temp > at.sh
$ bash ./at.sh

I don't know what seeing myself two years ago will be like.  Probably more
interesting down the road as I get farther away from the project.  We'll see.

[1] http://booktwo.org/notebook/vanity-press-plus-the-tweetbook/