Lance's TextBox

UPDATE:  For full TwitterMinder documentation, see this TwitterMinder article.

In my last two posts I mentioned my recent introduction to Twitter (after having watched so many people blab about it for the past few months).  So today I went ahead and published my Google Calendar to Twitter RSBScript, and gave it the name TwitterMinder:

TwitterMinder will check your Google Calendar for events that are occuring in the next hour, and if it finds any, they will be automatically submitted to your Twitter account.  RSBScript source code is available.

Now if my desktop agent (Twitterific, Tweet-r, etc.) knew how to automatically POST to TwitterMinder every hour, that would be nice.  I subscribed to TwitterMinder in FeedDemon:  FeedDemon includes my auth info on the querystring, and the rss feed itself returns either successful tweet details or nothing at all.

The coolest thing about TwitterMinder is the source.  If you look at it (available in the "developers" note), its amazingly simple thanks to the power of the RSSBus Gcal and Twitter connectors.  This source could easily be modified so that instead of connecting Google Calendar to Twitter, I could connect SalesForce.com events to Twitter, or Upcoming.org events to Twitter.

Technical details about TwitterMinder:

• TwitterMinder has two formats, text (Gcal_to_Twitter.rst) and RSS (Gcal_to_Twitter.rsb).  The text (.rst) will return a textual response indicating the message that was Tweeted or a statement that no events were found to tweet.  The RSS (.rsb) will return a rich RSS feed with 1 item per tweeted message.
  
• Both take either an Http Post or an Http Get.  The Http request should contain 4 inputs:
  
  1.  gcal_email - an email address used to authenticate with Google Calendar
  2.  gcal_password - a password used to authenticate with Google Calendar
  3.  twitter_user - a user name to authenticate with Twitter
  4.  twitter_password - a password to authenticate with Twitter
  
• Examples of how to use TwitterMinder:
  1.  Subscribe to the RSS (.rsb) endpoint in any feed reader, such as FeedDemon.  Include the inputs in the querystring, ie:
  http://textbox1.com/apps/twitterminder/Gcal_to_Twitter.rsb?gcal_email=lmrobins@gmail.com&gcal_password=****&twitter_user=lmrobins&twitter_password=****
  2.  Perform a standard web form http post to the text (.rst) endpoint, include the inputs in the querystring or in the postdata, ie:
  http://textbox1.com/apps/twitterminder/Gcal_to_Twitter.rst?gcal_email=lmrobins@gmail.com&gcal_password=****&twitter_user=lmrobins&twitter_password=****