As some of you might know, I am running a few twitter channels that use my brainchild, twuckoo, to periodically send a tweet.

In two of these cases the program takes its next message from a file and takes care not to tweet the same thing twice by keeping track of the messages already sent. This means, however, that the pool of sendable messages are depleted after a while and the script simply does not send any more tweets, the channel becomes dead.

This has happened a couple of times in the past and I only realized it with a few days of delay which is kind of awkward (if you were subscribed to one of these accounts, I apologize). So I decided to have twuckoo send a notification in this case so I can go in and refill its queue. Hence twuckoo version 0.3.5 was born which sends an email to the address set in the configuration file when it failed to send a message.

To install it, add gemcutter to the list of gem sources if you haven’t already:

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gem source --add http://gemcutter.org

And install twuckoo:

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gem install twuckoo

You might be thinking that it would be more straightforward to have the program replenish itself so that no intervention from the part of the developer is needed. And you would be right, this could be a task for the next version. I still think it is a good idea to send a notification so the (wo)man in charge knows it happened.

So go ahead, have a look at the README, set up your own twitter channel and don’t fret about when the queue would run dry. You’ll be notified.