twanslationparty

Takes tweets stored in a twitstash database and reposts them in hilariously corrupted English.

by Scott Smitelli

Installation and Requirements

twanslationparty requires a PHP 5.3 installation with the following extensions installed:

• curl - Required by the twitteroauth library for making HTTP requests
• mbstring - I believe twitter-text-php requires this for Unicode
• pdo - Provides a database interface
• pdo-mysql - PDO driver for MySQL

Additionally, a live twitstash database needs to exist on your server. twanslationparty will add an additional table to that database to store state.

To install:

1. Set up twitstash and run it at least once to "prime" the database.

2. git clone --recursive https://github.com/smitelli/twanslationparty.git && cd twanslationparty

3. Run the following query on your twitstash database to add a table:

   CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `twanslationparty` (
     `original_id` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL,
     `translated_id` bigint(20) unsigned DEFAULT NULL,
     PRIMARY KEY (`original_id`),
     KEY `translated_id` (`translated_id`)
   ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;
   

   Change twanslationparty to something more meaningful, especially if you plan to run multiple instances.

4. cp config.ini-sample config.ini

5. Edit config.ini to suit your fancy. You'll have to put your own Twitter and MySQL authentication in there. Remember to set the table name to match the query from step 3.

6. ./twanslationparty.sh

Any new tweets that are present in the twitstash database will be mangled by the translation API, then reposted to the configured Twitter account. Each tweet will be stored in twanslationparty's table as it is successfully sent. Retweets will never be sent. Location info will be sent if it is present and the target Twitter account has this support enabled. Any tweets that become "deleted" in the twitstash database will be deleted from the target Twitter account.

If twitstash has a huge number of unsent tweets, it's entirely likely that the target account will saturate its daily tweet limit and stop updating. To prevent this from happening, you can run a query to bulk-mark all existing tweets as having been sent, even if that is not actually the case. Starting point query:

INSERT INTO `twanslationparty` (`original_id`) (
  SELECT `id` FROM `tweets` WHERE `deleted` IS NULL AND `rt_id` = 0
);

Any tweets added after this query runs should post in a timely manner.

The shell script is designed to never output anything, so you can add it in a cron job without worrying about spamming root's inbox with junk. A file called debug.log will be created (and appended) by the shell script. There's generally nothing useful in that file.

Acknowledgements

This package includes Abraham Williams' twitteroauth library. https://github.com/abraham/twitteroauth

This package also includes Matt Sanford's twitter-text-php library. https://github.com/mzsanford/twitter-text-php