Tweet Posts with Octopress

Thanks to the blog post by Tony Guntharp who got inspired from another blog post by Adnan Abdulhussein on how to integrate twitter posting with Octopress. His post was some 3 Years old and the twitter gem for Octopress version 5.16.0 has gone through a lot of changes, So technically I did some rewrite into the ruby configuration code and fixed it so I can post the tweets with the latest twitter gem. The basic idea remains the same taken from the predecessors blogs, you create a post and print the tweet message you want to give and it create a link to the post in the tweet_queue file. When the rake deploy task is called, it reads from the tweet_queue file and tweets what’s in their line by line. This way you can create multiple posts at a time, and they all will be tweeted when you run your rake deploy task for your blog.

Create a twitter application.

A twitter application is must to post to twitter. Head over to https://apps.twitter.com/app/new, sign in and create a new application for your blog.

In settings: ensure read and write is enabled.

In Keys and access tokens: take note of the following details.

  • Consumer Keys
  • Consumer Secret
  • Access Token
  • Access Token Secret

Install the gem

We’ll be using the twitter gem to update the status. Put the below line in your development Gemfile

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gem twitter

from the terminal run bundle install

Configure Octopress to use twitter gem

Open the Rakefile in your favorite editor and add the below near the top with other required in the Rakefile.

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require twitter

Add the following lines after the server_port line

```ruby Twitter Configuration # Twitter config (for tweeting posts) client = Twitter::REST::Client.new do |config| config.consumer_key = “YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY” config.consumer_secret = “YOUR_CONSUMER_SECRET” config.access_token = “YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN”” config.access_token_secret = “YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET end

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# MAKE SURE THERE IS A TRAILING SLASH, otherwise the linking won't work
blog_url = "YOUR_BLOG_URL/" ```

ensure the trailing slash(/), It is required to append the date-name combination of the posts to form the url of the post.

Modify the new_post rake task

Search for :new_post rake task in the Rakefile and replace the task with the following.

```ruby Modifying new_post task

usage rake new_post[my-new-post] or rake new_post[‘my new post’] or rake new_post (defaults to “new-post”)

desc “Begin a new post in #{source_dir}/#{posts_dir}” task :new_post, :title, :tweet do |t, args| raise “### You haven’t set anything up yet. First run rake install to set up an Octopress theme.” unless File.directory?(source_dir) mkdir_p “#{source_dir}/#{posts_dir}” args.with_defaults(:title => ‘new-post’, :tweet => ‘’) title = args.title filename = “#{source_dir}/#{posts_dir}/#{Time.now.strftime(‘%Y-%m-%d’)}-#{title.to_url}.#{new_post_ext}” if File.exist?(filename) abort(“rake aborted!”) if ask(“#{filename} already exists. Do you want to overwrite?”, [‘y’, ‘n’]) == ‘n’ end puts “Creating new post: #{filename}” open(filename, ‘w’) do |post| post.puts “—” post.puts “layout: post” post.puts “title: "#{title.gsub(/&/,’&’)}"” post.puts “date: #{Time.now.strftime(‘%Y-%m-%d %H:%M’)}” post.puts “comments: true” post.puts “categories: “ post.puts “—” end tweet = args.tweet if not tweet == ‘’ # add to twitter status queue puts ‘Adding post to tweet queue, it will be tweeted after deploying.’ open(‘tweet_queue’, ‘a’) do |file| file.puts “#{tweet} - #{blog_url}#{Time.now.strftime(‘%Y/%m/%d’)}/#{title.to_url}/” end end end

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If you already have a modified task, the only changes are the task declaration ```(task :new_post, :title, :tweet do |t, args|)``` and the last few lines starting with ```tweet = args.tweet```.

### Setup to post tweets on deploy

Look for the `deplpoy_task` in the `Rakefile` and change or replace the files accordingly.

```ruby Deploy task
desc "Default deploy task"
task :deploy do
  # Check if preview posts exist, which should not be published
  if File.exists?(".preview-mode")
    puts "## Found posts in preview mode, regenerating files ..."
    File.delete(".preview-mode")
    Rake::Task[:generate].execute
  end

  Rake::Task[:copydot].invoke(source_dir, public_dir)
  Rake::Task["#{deploy_default}"].execute

  # Tweet
  next if not File.exists? 'tweet_queue'
  puts "Tweeting..."
  open('tweet_queue', 'r') do |file|
    while (line = file.gets)
      puts "Tweeting '#{line.gsub("\n", "")}' for @#{client.current_user.screen_name}..."
      client.update(line)
    end
  end
  puts "Deleting queue..."
  rm 'tweet_queue'
end

or just add the #Tweet task in deploy task.

Usage

Now while creating your new_post you need to specify a separate message for the tweet when you create a post. This is the best way to give you the option of choosing whether you want to tweet the post or not. It also allows you to add @’s and #’s to the tweet message separately from the post title.

For Example:

The first part is the URL, and the second part is your tweet message.

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rake new_post["HowTo Tweet New Posts in Octopress","HowTo Tweet New Posts in Octopress @twitter"]

You should be able to see your new post generated by the rake task.

Once, this is done. Go Ahead and write into your post and rake gen_deploy should do the rest of it.

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