= twitterss

bvandenbos@gmail.com 2009

== Description

Twitterss is supposed to be a super simple, lightweight RSS => Twitter script
that can support multiple feeds to multiple Twitter accounts.  Since Twitter
is quickly becoming an SEO/marketing tool, it's common to find yourself
maintaining a lot of content from many different sources.  This allows your
webapp/blog to only support RSS and allow this script to manage the push to
Twitter.


== Requirements

 * Ruby 1.8.6/7 (probably works with other versions but not tested)
 * rubygems
 * Gems: twitter4r, tinyurl
 * *nix or OSX.  Windows is not supported (though you might be able to get
   it to run on Windows).


== Usage

Twitterss is meant to be used as a cron job that runs however often.

   $ ./twitterss twitterrss.yml


== Configuration

Configuration is handled by a YAML file.  If you're unfamiliar with YAML look
here: http://www.yaml.org/.  Here's an example config file:

legalnews:
  rss: http://www.avvo.com/news.rss
  login: avvolegalnews
  password: secret

cnn_money_top_stories:
  rss: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/money_topstories.rss
  login: money_news
  password: secret
  max: 5

cnn_money_markets:
  rss: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/money_markets.rss
  login: money_news
  password: secret
  max: 3

This will tell twitterss maintain two twitter accounts.  Note that you can point
multiple RSS feeds at the same Twitter account if desired.  In this way you can 
have your Twitter feeds act as aggregators of multiple sources.  The default
value for 'max' is 5. 


== Notes

To keep track of posts that have already been sent to Twitter, Twitterrss needs
to maintain state.  Currently it does this by dumping a file to the home
directory of the user running the script (.twitterrss_history).


== License

Copyright (c) 2009 Ben VandenBos

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without
restriction, including without limitation the rights to use,
copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following
conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES
OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT
HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.