Gating Twitter to IRC using Perl and Net::Twitter

The other day I had a strop about someone carrying on a Twitter conversation in IRC, since I didn’t have a Twitter account and had no idea what people were talking about. It was at that point that I floated the idea of gating the channel members’ tweets into the channel so I would still only have to look at IRC to follow what was going on. To me not really any more anoying or intrusive than announcing our blog posts, which the planet bot already does.

People were generally in favour of it, so I had a look around for libraries. I quickly found the very handy Net::Twitter Perl module and bolted on the Twitter bits to an existing quote bot skeleton.

The result is Twitfolk. It currently lives in #bitfolk on irc.bitfolk.com. The source is in SVN at https://svn.bitfolk.com/repos/twitfolk/.

PS. I am not a very good Perl programmer but it seems to work.

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