static_tl 0.3

What is it?

It’ a tool that makes sure your TL won’t be gone for ever if for some reason twitter decides to no longer play nice.

In a way, it also makes it possible to:

• edit your tweets

• have them longer than 140 characters

Show me!

Here’s an example of static_tl in action:

http://dmerej.info/tweets

How to use it ?

• Install Python3 and then install static_tl with pip

• Create an app on http://apps.twitter.com

• Edit ~/.config/static_tl.toml to have something like:

  [auth]
  api_key = "<Consumer Key>"
  api_secret = "<Consumer Secret>"
  
  token = "<Acces Token>"
  token_secret = "<Acess Token Secret>"
  
  [[users]]
  
  [users.user_one]
  with_replies = false
  
  [users.user_two]
  with_replies = true

• Then run:

  static-tl get

This will generate some files with your recent tweets in a json folder.

For instance, if your run it on 2016 October 10, you’ll get two files:

• json/<user>/2016-09.json (all the tweets from September)

• json/<user>/2016-10.json (all the tweets from October so far)

• Next time you’ll run static-tl get, we will look at the most recent status ID in the most recent .json file and only fetch new tweets. This means you can edit or even delete the tweets that are older than that :)

• Then, when you are ready you can generate a completely static copy of your TL with:

  static-tl gen

(By static, we mean that it’s possible to upload those html files wherever you want so it’s extremely easy to publish your new TL on the web)

Permalinks

If you want to generate permalinks, simply add site_url at the top of the .toml file:

site_url = http://example.com/tweets

Tweaking the output

Customization can be done by simply editing the Jinja templates in templates.

From the template you have access to all the fields returned by the official twitter API.

You can also put any file in the static folder : they will get copied into the html folder : useful for images, css files and the like.