twtxt: Microblogging for Hackers

Productivity Sauce

Maybe you are not keen on using closed and tightly-controlled third-party microblogging services like Twitter. Or maybe you are just looking for a straightforward way to share your thoughts with the world directly from the command-line. In either case, twtxt might be something right up your alley. This little tool makes it possible to push updates and follow other twtxt users from the convenience of the terminal. The clever part is that twtxt stores your updates in a plain text file. Make this file publicly accessible via HTTP and other users can subscribe to your stream.

twtxt is written in Python 3, and the easiest way to install it on your system is through the PIP tool. To do this on Debian and Ubuntu-based Linux distributions, run the following commands as root:

apt-get install python3-pip
pip3 install twtxt

Run then the twtxt quickstart command to configure basic settings, and you are good to go. twtxt features a handful of simple commands. To post an update, use the twtxt tweet command followed by the update message, for example: twtxt tweet "Hello World!". The twtxt timeline lets you view your stream, while the twtxt view twtxt shows the feed of the specific user (twtxt in this case). To follow another twtxt user, use the twtxt follow twtxt https://buckket.org/twtxt_news.txt command (you need to replace the example user and path with the actual values). For further info on using twtxt, head over to twtxt documentation. And if you want to follow yours truly, I'm dmpop and my twtxt URL is http://dmpop.dhcp.io/twtxt.txt.