How to use Twitter's STAR to auto-retweet

If you've ever thought there should be an easier way to re-tweet a message in twitter well now there is. No longer do you have to copy+paste and prefix "RT: @" to the mesage and then have to worry about cropping it down to under 140 characters.

Thanks to the power of Yahoo Pipes and FriendFeed you can automatically retweet any message you mark with a star (favorite). It's fairly easy.

1. Get a friend feed account if you don't have one. Fortunately it's super easy now-a-days because you can use your twitter login to create a FriendFeed account. So go, get an account.

2. Once you have a FF account make sure you add your twitter service. This is easier than it might seem (and it may have done it automatically if you signed up with twitter. If not just add your twitter account by going to Settings, Add Service, click the twitter icon, enter your twitter username, and bam all done. Honestly, at some point you'll probably want to use friendfeed more than twitter so feel free to add other accounts you want to bring in as well if you're feeling up to it.

3. Now go to this yahoo pipe and put your username in the form then hit the button "Run Pipe" - after that is done right click the "Get as RSS" link and copy that link address.

4. Go back to friend feed and add a "Custom RSS/ATOM feed" service to your account using the RSS address you copied from Yahoo Pipes.

5. Now go to http://friendfeed.com/settings/posting - You might have to authenticate your account so you can post to twitter from here.. Do that. Then click the option "Post my friend feed entries to twitter by default" then pick the option "the services I've selected below" and then pick the one that looks like this: "Custom RSS/Atom (http://pi...)" then hit save settings.

5. Go to twitterfeed.com and setup a feed based on the RSS url you got from pipes. I setup my twitterfeed to poll every 30 minutes and to post up to 5 items per.. I don't retweet that often so it's probably overkill; but you can do whatever suites you.

That's it. Now, whenever you star an item it will be pulled into yahoo pipes, modified a touch to have the RT: @ and then sent to FF which will make sure it is the right length, add a small url to it so people can chat about it at FF, and then send it to twitter as a tweet by you.

CruiseControl and 500 Server Errors

Today, for the first time in a few months, I had to interact with my cruise control server again. To be honest, I'm not sure what happened but it stopped working and I had to jump through some hoops to get it all working again.

First I had to uninstall it and install it in a directory that didn't have any spaces in the name. Before it was installed at c:\program files\cruisecontrol - that space was causing a weird JSP error that prevented compilation.

Thus I installed it at c:\cruisecontrol. Of course, I hadn't touched it in so long I had forgotten about my special ant tasks and I had to go find those again (uninstall actually deleted my entire old directory.

However, during the reinstall there was a problem because the old service wasn't removed (maybe because I had it running as me?) So I had to remove the service

sc delete <SERVICE name>

Then I reinstalled again and it worked out OK. Once that was resolved I had to get my projects all checked back out of SVN. I had forgotten that CC comes with a connectfour project by default and so, after I replaced the config.xml with my customized one, I couldn't load the CC dashboard anymore - I had to delete the connectfour project directory and restart the CC service.

Eventually I got it all up and running again and my projects built OK. Now I just have to train 2 other teams on setting up their ColdFusion projects to run tests from an ANT script so that they can take full advantage of CC and MxUnit. I'll be doing that tomorrow.

Then I have to figure out how to get CC to build a .net app; if I can't hopefully I can install CC.net on the same server as CC without any issues. I had hoped to use cc.rb but there are some issues with it on a windows server so that is out of the picture at the moment (due to our needs for building .net apps).