Twitter is everywhere. Its on my phone, its on my laptop. It helped decide the election (don’t believe me, go search twitter for election, obama, biden, mccain, palin, vote or anything else to do with the election this year). It helped people find gas in Atlanta when we had a shortage. Now, its helping get the word out about the latest uploads to Linuxtracker.org.

Yesterday, I managed to cobble together some code (from some that I found online) that automatically posts to the linuxtracker twitter account *EVERY* time a new torrent is uploaded. It posts the name of the file as well as a link to the torrent details page. Its a pretty simple piece of code that actually uses the php_curl library to do the heavy lifting. The part I stumbled with was getting it to post the whole damned URL. Luckily I stumbled upon it.

I’ve posted the code below for anyone to use, mind you, I changed the names to protect the innocent, and I won’t answer any questions about it. I just wanted to share!

//Twitter Update!

$email = "USERNAME";
$password = "PASSWORD";
$status = "This is the status message here. Duh.
";

$url = "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml";

$session = curl_init();
curl_setopt ( $session, CURLOPT_URL, $url );
curl_setopt ( $session, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC );
curl_setopt ( $session, CURLOPT_HEADER, false );
curl_setopt ( $session, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $email . ":" . $password );
curl_setopt ( $session, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 );
curl_setopt ( $session, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt ( $session, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,"status=" . urlencode($status));
$result = curl_exec ( $session );
curl_close( $session );

?>

Sometimes you just want to get away from it all. In case you hadn’t noticed (and based on my recent traffic graphs, you haven’t) I haven’t been posting much here lately. Blame it on the work I’ve been doing at linuxtracker. Blame it on the funk that has seemed to come over the blogging community since the middle of January. Blame it on the 60 degrees one day 29 the next weather we’re having here in Georgia, or just blame it on my need to get away from everything.

I admit, I could use a vacation. Right now, a 24 hour flight to Australia doesn’t sound too bad compared to the cold, then warm, then wet then dry then snowy weather we’ve had lately. No matter the amount of sea foam (which, contrary to the color wheel at Home Depot, is not really green so much as shaving cream white). I could use a vacation. So could Amy. It wouldn’t take much at this point for either of us to dial up a flight to Oz, England, or even Colorado and head away for a week or two.

Nothing spells relief like a well tailored holiday where you can just veg. Does it? I do promise to work at getting back in to the swing of things as march comes in like a lion at the end of the week….