Logan Koester

Sometimes I wonder why I bother…

A project I've been working on watches Twitter for some search keywords, with the goal of finding new customers, jobs, items for sale, etc. For example, a computer repair shop might want to watch for the keywords "laptop" and "broken", and then reply to tweets where they think they can help.
But as anyone who uses [...]

This morning I came across a forum post containing a fairly large list of people I wanted to follow from one of my Twitter accounts. There are a lot of auto-follow tools out there, but most of them are spammy "viral marketing" nonsense, want to store my Twitter password on their servers and I don't [...]

As a Web Service
TweetShrink, a web service from TRNSFR, uses a database of common instant / text messaging abbreviations to reduce the number of characters in a tweet. It's essentially a human-readable compression algorithm. For example, "Some text to shrink" becomes "sum text 2 shrnk" when passed through their API.
But it doesn't enforce Twitter's 140 [...]

'

TweetShrink's API is so simple that this gem barely adds anything on top of HTTParty, but here it is.

require 'rubygems'
require 'tweetshrink'

t = TweetShrink.shrink "One wonders why"
# t['difference'] => 4
# t['text'] => "1 wonders y"
# t['original_text'] => "One wonders why"

You can get it from my github account, here, or via rubygems like
$ sudo gem install logankoester-tweetshrink
Enjoy.