Post to Twitter from Ubuntu Deskbar
19 March, 2007Deskbar is a Gnome widget you can embed in a panel and can be used for opening applications, opening items from your browser history, doing web searches and all sorts. It’s not as good as Quicksilver but better than Launchy. It fires when you hit a key combo (mine is CTRL+SPACE) and looks a bit like this:
For the soulless, Twitter is length limited asynchronous multicast IM
, for everyone else, it’s a nice way to keep up to date with what your friends are doing using the web, IM or SMS. My rarely-posted to Twitter page is here.
Lucky for me, Deskbar is easily extendable , and so that’s just what I’ve done. I looked at the Twitter Wiki, found a Python Twitter library downloaded their little icon thing and written a sript to let you post to Twitter from your Deskbar. It looks like this:
To install:
- Install python-twitter
- Grab deskbar-twitter.py and twitter.png and put them in ~/.gnome2/deskbar-applet/handlers/
- Open your downloaded deskbar-twitter.py in an editor
- Replace TWITTER_USERNAME and TWITTER_PASSWORD with your Twitter details
- Replace YOUR_USERNAME with your Ubuntu username
It took longer to write this blog post than the code, so patches welcome.
Comments
Luis Villa
19 March, 2007 at 18:26
Phil Wilson
19 March, 2007 at 19:45
Raphael Slinckx
21 March, 2007 at 08:55
Phil Wilson
21 March, 2007 at 09:59
mithras86
26 April, 2007 at 18:26
Xlife
30 April, 2007 at 01:29
mithras86
01 May, 2007 at 18:48
Amblin
11 June, 2007 at 16:49
Fred
21 August, 2007 at 18:50
Ajnasz
07 September, 2007 at 08:48
Phil Wilson
07 September, 2007 at 11:23
reda
20 September, 2007 at 01:38
Helen Neely
27 September, 2009 at 21:36
Evans
21 November, 2009 at 16:00
Ivan Lezhnjov Jr.
18 November, 2010 at 17:07
Debby Bruck
30 April, 2011 at 23:40
The link to your twitter page is busted.
[And this is a nice hack that might lead to me finally getting a twitter account. Dammit.]
Thanks! Fixed!
Very nice idea !
Using it now.
You can also embed the icon in the python extension, by base64-encoding it and loading at runtime. Also since 2.18 deskbar supports installing by drag and dropping a .py link to the prefs panel and it gets installed automatically. Finally, you should probably add a simple config dialog to store the twitter username and password.
Very nice work !
Thanks very much for that Raphael. I had seen other extensions using base64-encoded icons but none of them worked, so I didn’t bother 😉
Yes, you’re right about the preferences, but I was too lazy 🙂
I really like your idea to post to twitter with deskbar, but i cannot get python-twitter to work. First by ubuntu doesn’t recognize the easy_setup command.
Secondly, i get (after some python traceback calls) the following error rule after I started the python script “setup.py test”:
pkg_resources.DistributionNotFound: simplejson>=1.5
What should I do, easy_setup cannot be installed through the repo?
TIA!
Really cool, thanks 😉
@mithras86:
Try this:
wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
sudo python ez_setup.py
sudo easy_install -U simplejson
That should take care of the dependencies.
Best Regards
Yes, that does the trick, thanks a lot!
Please note you point to the icon “twitter.png”, but provided an icon called “deskbar-twitter.png”, so you should change one of them to get the icon working.
But furthermore: this is really cool, i’ll post it at forums i’m visiting very often!
I’ve put together a more complete twitter plugin for Deskbar. If anyone is interested it’s here
It’s telling me that the api.Update() method requires exactly two arguments where I supplied four (?!). Anyone else having this problem?
Nice work!
A small modification required if you want to use it with ptyhon-twitter 0.4:
@@ -20,8 +20,8 @@ HANDLERS = {
#It simply always displays “Hello World” in the dropdown list.
class TwitterMatch(Match):
def action(self, text=None):
– api = twitter.Api()
– api.PostUpdate(‘TWITTER_USERNAME’, ‘TWITTER_PASSWORD’, self.name)
+ api = twitter.Api(‘TWITTER_USERNAME’, ‘TWITTER_PASSWORD’)
+ api.PostUpdate(self.name)
def get_category(self):
return “actions”
def get_verb(self):
Excellent, thanks for the patch!
Hi, Thanks a lot for your work.
I don’t use Twitter but I like the concept, and your tool is perfect
However, I don’t think everybody wants to go through installing that lib (unless there are distro packages),
so I made my own version using only HTTP methods (which are included by default I think)
anyway here is it
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=554874
it’s still far from perfect but I tried it and it worked
Again very nice tool, I think I’ll give this twitter thing a try 🙂
Thank guys for sharing you code, I have downloaded them and will roll up my sleeves and start hacking it later this weekend. Will leave a comment to let you know how it goes.
This is a nice piece. I just started using Ubuntu as my main OS and this seems like a good way to get to know my way around it. I will also play with your code and let you know if I can contribute to it.
Thanks for posting.
Cool. Could you write a plugin for Google Buzz? I think it must be fairly easy to do but I’m the worst programmer ever.
Look kinda neat. My only concern is the bulking up of all layers at the top of web browsers. This leaves less actual page view when we continue to add more horizontal bars. Thanks for the intro to this option. I just plain love twitter. Debby