James Smith

JabberStatus was originally inspired by Twitter's facility to update your status via XMPP/Jabber. Unfortunately, Twitter's Jabber interface has been down for months now, which is rather sucky.

The solution to this? Extend JabberStatus to work for Twitter as well as Facebook. It turned out to be very easy, so it's online now. Just add twitterstatus@jabber.org to your contact list and it will talk you through the rest.

The JabberStatus code has moved to GitHub now, so you can grab it from there. The code for the CO2Updates app has also moved there.

I just saw the One Hundred Months campaign, and decided it was ripe for a bit of automated Twittering. So, 5 minutes hacking and we have One Hundred Months on Twitter. Code (as ever these days) is available from GitHub.

I'm amazed by what computers can do sometimes. This one seriously took me longer to publish to the world than to write.

I like Twitter. I'm not sure why, but I do. However, I don't like the fact that I can't view my friends timeline via RSS without seeing my own updates in there as well. I already know what I've written, I just want to see what other people wrote. To scratch that particular itch, over lunchtime I built a Yahoo! Pipe to filter my own updates out of my feed, and you can use it too. Check it out here.

I read this article last night, about using Twitter to make machines talk, specifically Tower Bridge. "What a fantastic idea", I thought to myself. "Maybe I can do the same thing for climate change". Also, it would be a good way to flex my Ruby muscles a little and get some "fun" coding in for the first time since Amelia was born.

So, a couple of hours of Ruby later, and we have atmospheric CO2 updates on Twitter. The code is dead simple, and can be grabbed from GitHub.