kimotter

2012-01-20

A Ruby client for posting tweets from the command line. Instead of using the Twitter API directly, it posts by driving the mala API (a web posting form that lived at http://api.ma.la/twitter/) with Mechanize. It was published as a gem.

Usage

Requires Ruby 1.9 plus nokogiri and mechanize (per the README).

gem install kimotter
kimotter "your tweet text"

Before posting, you are asked to agree to a confirmation message extracted from the page. Example run from the README, kept in the original Japanese because it is the actual console output — the tweet reads "Didn't know about EventSource, looks genuinely useful", and the prompt is "I swear, truthfully, that I am kimoto [y/N]".

> kimotter "EventSource知らんかった、普通に便利そう"
嘘偽りなく自分がキモトであると誓います[y/N] y
hi kimoto. try to tweet your cool message
done!

There are two options: -d, --debug (debug mode) and -f, --force (run without the pre-flight API limit check). The limit itself is enforced by the endpoint; --force only skips this client's own check.

Internals

Component layout. It's a small gem of roughly 170 lines total, built as two layers: the Kimotter class that drives the form, and KimotterCLI which handles the interactive side.

Component diagram of kimotter

Kimotter (lib/kimotter.rb) — provides fetch_api_limit (GETs the endpoint and parses the API limit values and the confirmation message), tweet (puts the text into the posting form's status field, checks the is_kimoto checkbox, and submits), and api_limit? (determines whether usage has hit the cap)
HTML parsing (load_from_mala_html) is done with Nokogiri. It reads API Limit: used / cap from the body text with a regex, and extracts the text next to the form's checkbox as the confirmation message
The filter method is a hook for transforming the text before posting; the default is a pass-through (a code comment says "override it if you need to")
KimotterCLI (lib/kimotter_cli.rb) — handles option parsing (-d / -f / -a (override the endpoint URL)), receiving the text, the API limit check, the y/N confirmation, and choosing the exit code. When no text is given as an argument, it launches $EDITOR on a temp file to write it, and newlines are replaced with spaces
bin/kimotter / bin/koiketter — both are nothing but a call to KimotterCLI.execute; koiketter is a separate command with its endpoint pointed at http://kimoto.ssig33.com/api

The flow of a single post looks like this.

Sequence diagram of kimotter's tweet flow

Exit codes: 0 on success, 1 when stopped by the API limit, 2 when the confirmation prompt got EOF, and 3 when declined with anything other than y.

GitHub kimoto/kimotter

🤖 This English version is machine-translated by AI.