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demongin.org - <i>Django</i> and #twyt

Django and #twyt

A short "how to" that describes using "TWYT" to automatically tweet about new blog posts.


Tuesday, 2009-08-04 | demongin.org, Django, On the Internet, Programming

Like a racist, I believed that a strong man could regard the faiths of others as an opportunity for harmless daydreaming and no more.
Umberto Eco, Il pendolo di Foucault

Automatically tweeting when you publish a new blog post on your django blog is pretty much drop-dead simple.

The hardest part (which really is trivial) is overwriting the .save() function for your blog post class and, though that might sound daunting, it's about as easy as falling down the stairs.

But first things first. We're going to be using Andrew Price's twyt module (#twyt, @andyprice), so job number one will be to make sure you've got that mean mamajama installed: 

# aptitude update && aptitude install python-twyt
or, if you're working the yum angle as I have been lately, 
# yum install python-twyt.noarch
Once you've got twyt installed (and you're done screwing around with command-line tweeting, which is, for obvious reasons, hells of fun), it's time to fire up the IDE and take a look at your "models.py" file for your blog.

If your blog is like mine, you've got a class called "Post" that is your class for all updates to your blog--i.e. the thing that you want to automatically tweet. Here's a quick glance at the important part of my "Post" class from the demongin.org "models.py":
class Post(models.Model):
    # Fields
    title = models.CharField(max_length=666)
    subtitle = models.CharField(max_length=666)
    quote = models.TextField(blank=True)
    quote_attribution = models.CharField(max_length=200, blank=True)
    body = models.TextField()
    tag = models.ManyToManyField(Tag)

    pom = models.CharField(max_length=255, default=get_pom)
    pub_date = models.DateTimeField('date published', default=datetime.datetime.today())
    mod_date = models.DateTimeField('date modified', default=datetime.datetime.today())
Now, the important thing to keep in mind (especially if you're new at this, like I am) is that when you subclass models.Model, you get a bunch of free functions. One of those is the above-mentioned .save() function.

Overwriting this function, though that sounds complicated, is actually very easy, due the very minimal set of responsibilities that the function has. Once I figured out my twyt syntax, here's how my overwritten .save() function looked:
from twyt import twitter

class Post(models.Model):
    def save(self):
        """ Overwrite the .save() function to automatically tweet new posts. """        
        if not self.id:
            self.pub_date = datetime.date.today()
        self.mod_date = datetime.datetime.today()
        
        twitter_user = "toconnell@tyrannybelle.com"
        twitter_pass = "XXXXXXXXXX"
        tweet_string = "'%s' on http://demongin.org" % self.title
        
        t = twitter.Twitter()
        t.set_auth(twitter_user, twitter_pass)
        t.status_update(tweet_string)
        
        super(Post, self).save()
Pretty straight-forward, no? I import "twitter" from twyt make sure that we're working with a post with a pub_date and a mod_date, specify my idiosyncratic stuff (e.g. my user, pass and message format), make sure that the title of new posts goes across in the auto-tweet and then, in the final three lines, connect to twitter and do my tweet.

Granted, you're going to need something more sophisticated than this--duplication prevention would be nice, for starters, and passing along a notification message to django so that it could pop up in the admin interface couldn't hurt--in your production code, but this is the guts.