As you can probably tell, lately I've been redirecting my random thoughts to Twitter instead of my blog ("my news").  I figured blog entries should be for longer announcements or discussions on a particular subject and tweets should be for fleeting throughts or images.  This seems to be working out.

However, there seems to be an odd disconnect between blog entries, photos on my photoblog (Flickr), and tweets.

Whenever I create a new blog entry, I'm tempted to send a tweet announcing it.  Annoying.

The photoblog problem is exaggerated by services like Twitpic and Yfrog, which both seem to have made their way into mobile Twitter clients.  Flickr, on the other hand, seems to have been left out of the mix altogether.  It's strange, because Flickr provides the same, but much better, service, albeit without the Twitter integration.

I decided to add some glue in the form of some PHP code and a Python script, in order to automatically send tweets.  I used the Services_Twitter Pear package to access the Twitter API from PHP, the Python Twitter wrapper to access it from Python, and the DT Flickr library to access Flickr from Python.

Services_Twitter required me to edit the include_path in my php.ini, which I wasn't too happy about.  I'm considering submitting a bug, since instead of Services/Twitter.php, the script is actually in Net/Services/Twitter.php.  It might be a problem with the FreeBSD port.

So, if everything works right, whenever I add a blog entry, a tweet will be sent from my Twitter username.  Whenever I add a new photo to Flickr, within 10 minutes a tweet will be sent.

I was thinking of interleaving my Twitter timeline with my blog entries on the My News page, but I decided not to.  The tweets would be overwhelming!

New comments are currently disabled for this entry.