You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.
I, like many of you I'd imagine, have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Twitter at the moment. While there are many great aspects of the service, it's become a bit overwhelming to deal with the constant flow of information coming down the pipe. Anyway, a few months ago I wrote a little script to help myself separate the signal from the noise a little. All it does is send you emails from someone you are especially keen on following. I guess I could set up device notifications, but this seemed easier.
Anyhow, I'm calling it Tweemail for now and it's hosted over at Google code.
It's made up of three files:
config.php: This is the config file. It's actually the only thing you need to edit. All you need to do is add the user you want to follow, your email address to send updates to and then their email so that when you hit reply you can reply right back to them.
lastid: This is simply a counter, you don't need to worry about it. It just writes the latest ID of your friend's tweet.
index.php: I should probably rename this, but it's the guts of the operation. Nothing to play with in there.
Anyway, I'm sure the code is pretty gross and could be written much better, but it gets the job done. Unfortunately (or fortunately I guess), you'll need to have your own server to run it and you'll have to be able to set up a cron job, which just runs a script at whatever interval you want (I check once an hour myself).
That's it, hope you enjoy it and it's useful. I know I've found it to be.