After the last few weeks of trying to access Twitter from the command line, I set about writing something that I could expand to micro-blog to any social networking site that supports many of the Twitter API type commands. At the moment it only works with Twitter and Identi.ca, but my plan is to look at creating plugins, or more likely to allow others to create plugins, that can enable the tool to interact with other micro-blogging sites.
After trying to think of a decent name, I finally settled on Maisha. It's a Swahili word meaning "life". You can grab the code from CPAN as App-Maisha.
Currently you'll need to use the standard Perl install toolset to install the application, but ultimately I'd like to have something that you can install just about anywhere without having to go through all the headache of installing dependencies. I'll have a go at doing an .rpm and a .deb package release, and will also try using PAR. It would be nice to have this as a standalone application that just about anyone can use, but for now CPAN will have to do.
My next immediate step is to look at writing something that interfaces to Facebook without requiring a developer key or any such nonsense. It will probably have to involve a bit of screen scraping, unless there is some more official API, but as yet I haven't found it. Everything regards Facebook applications seems to centre around the developer application that can do all sorts of dubious things, but mine is purely for the user to control from their desktop, not a 3rd party website/server. Thus giving them a developer API key assigned to me is wholly inappropriate. It would be nice if they had a restricted User API, which allows you to update your status and look at your friends' statuses, but I think I'll be in the minority wanting it.
When looking at making a
Re:.deb
barbie on 2009-02-16T13:25:26
I probably will eventually, but wanted to "have a go" for myself first. A friend from Gloucestershire LUG gave a presentation about creating
.deb's and uploading them to LaunchPad, and thought this might be a good experiment to see how that works :)
Sounds interesting. I'll create RPMs for Centos and Fedora and stick them in my RPM repository.
Re:.rpm
barbie on 2009-02-16T16:57:51
Thanks
:) I'll sort out a link to those too for the website once it's ready ;) Re:.rpm
davorg on 2009-02-17T10:13:34
Ok, the Fedora 10 and Centos 5 RPMs are available (along with a few dependencies that weren't in the standard repositories).
The easiest method to get them is probably to add my repo definition files (for Fedora and Centos) to your yum configuration and then just run:
yum install perl-App-Maisha
Re:.rpm
barbie on 2009-02-17T12:57:04
Great, thanks. I'll add this to the downloads page. Currently working on the website now
:)
WWW::Facebook::API also supports the Facebook desktop api:
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Login_Desktop_App
http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/CLSCOTT/WWW-Facebook-API-0.4.14/examples/faceboo
I don't have any experience with the desktop apps but as the maintainer of WWW::Facebook::API I can help you out and roll any patches out quickly.
Re: Facebook
barbie on 2009-02-16T19:04:21
I did briefly look at WWW-Facebook-API, but it requires the API key. The problem is that Facebook, like other similar API developers, assume that only compiled languages would ever want to access them from user-space. If you want to use a language like Perl you have to hide behind your own server, so you can hide the API key
:( Hence why I hope they eventually acknowledge a restricted User API that the user can have control over.
