nodge's blog

Have you ever thought of your router twitting status updates? E.g. if the connection goes down and comes back you are notified right away in a light-weight fashion.

Never?

Nevermind, here's how to do that:

1. Create an account on twitter.
2. Create a Basic authentication string with

   1 echo -n "$username:$password" | base64

3. Use the following shell script, substituting $base64string with the string obtained in previous step:

   1 #!/bin/sh
    2 
    3 TWEET="status=$*"
    4 
    5 CONTENT_LENGTH=`echo -n $TWEET | wc -c`
    6 
    7 MESSAGE="
    8 POST /statuses/update.xml HTTP/1.1
    9 Host: twitter.com
   10 User-Agent: OpenWRT Twitter
   11 Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*
   12 Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
   13 Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
   14 Content-Length: $CONTENT_LENGTH
   15 Authorization: Basic $base64string
   16 
   17 $TWEET"
   18 
   19 echo "$MESSAGE" | telnet twitter.com 80 > /dev/null 2>/dev/null

4. Save it as /usr/bin/tweet and start using it right away.
5. Set up some cron job, make it log something and... follow your router :)

You can follow my router, just in case :)

See also:

• Scripting Twitter with cURL