gakimball / slow-twitter

🐢🐤 Read Twitter the boring way

slow-twitter

Read Twitter the boring way

A small service that will periodically grab your Twitter feed, and collect the most recent posts into an entry in a JSON Feed.

• Setup
• Configuration
• Usage
• Testing
• License

Setup

Eventually I'll put this on Docker Hub, but until then you can clone the repository and build the Docker container.

Configuration

Map a directory to /usr/src/app/public for use by the container. Inside the directory, add config.json:

{
  "origin": "http://localhost:8080",
  "twitter_api": {
    "consumer_key": "",
    "consumer_secret": "",
    "access_key": "",
    "access_secret": ""
  },
  "digests": [
    {
      "name": "Morning",
      "cron": "0 9 * * *"
    },
    {
      "name": "Evening",
      "cron": "0 20 * * *"
    }
  ]
}

Each digest has a name and runs on a schedule according to Cron syntax. Each time a digest is created, it fetches every tweet posted to your timeline since the last digest (up to a maximum of 200, the limit of Twitter's API).

The config file also supports these optional settings:

• mute: an array of strings to filter out of each digest. Keywords starting with @ will filter out retweets, quote tweets, and mentions of those users.
• max_feed_items: maximum number of items kept in the JSON Feed. When a new one is added over the limit, the oldest item is removed. The default value is 50.
• frontend: an alternate domain to use for Twitter links, e.g. https://nitter.net.

Usage

Run the container to start the scheduler, and a server that serves the feed, available at /feed.json. The first time you run the server, it will create an initial feed entry with the last 50 posts on your timeline.

Testing

There's a few scripts in the test/ folder to mess around with various features:

# Print the JSON output of the Twitter API
node test/test-tweets.js > tweets.json

# Print the HTML output of the timeline
node test/test-html.js > timeline.html

# Generate a test digest feed (writes to `./public/feed.json`)
node test/test-digest.js

To Do

• Format RTs correctly
• Auto-linkify text
• Figure out RTs of RTs
• Max number of entries in feed
• Apply mute filters to links
• Fix duplicate content for retweets
• Expand URLs
• Reverse order of posts (old → new)
• Show/indicate multiple images?
• Option for alternate frontend (e.g. Nitter)
• Render RTs flat, not as blockquotes
• Compress HTML
• Format line breaks
• Add link previews
• URL filters not working?
• Handle videos
• Strip UTM
• Unicode issues (emoji don't display properly)

License

MIT © Geoff Kimball