pubmed-rss-twitter

Summary:

This is a simple method for making a Twitter bot from a pubmed or bioRχiv RSS feed. It will work on any Mac or *nix, uses free / open software and does not depend on any proprietary or third-party services. You can customize and curate the output items at will. The principle of operation is:

• fetch the latest feed items as formatted text (using feedstail, a command-line RSS reader)
• change each item into a tweetable blurb (using rss-filter.pl)
• send it to Twitter (using ttytter, a command-line Twitter client)

Requirements:

• perl
• python
• pip, the python package manager
• feedstail, an RSS watcher, which you install with pip above
• ttytter, a command-line twitter client
  available in most Linux / Mac package systems (Homebrew, Debian, Ubuntu, &c.)

Howto:

1. If you don't already have a dedicated Twitter account for the feed, or haven't defined an RSS feed, read steps 1 and 2 (and the rest too while you're there) of Rob Lanfear's instructions
2. Install python and pip from the above URLs (in Requirements)
3. Use pip to install feedstail: pip install feedstail
4. Install ttytter from source or from your package manager, e.g. brew install ttytter for brew on Mac
5. Follow ttytter's instructions to create your OAuth keyfile
6. Place the rss-filter.pl file somewhere handy
7. Run feedstail in the background with your url(s) of choice, pipe the output into rss-filter.pl, and thence to ttytter.
   For example see below or command.sh
8. Enjoy your custom firehose of scientific literature

Example:

nohup feedstail -f "{title}__{tags}__{author}__{link}" -r -u "http://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/erss.cgi?rss_guid=$FEED_ID" | perl rss-filter.pl | ttytter -keyf=$ACCOUNT_KEYFILE -script &

Notes:

• Now with bioRχiv support!
• Once every few months or so, the bot stops—I have no idea why, but restarting it always fixes it.
• The behavior of feedstail seems to be to always fetch the "newest" items, so stopping and re-starting may result in repeat postings. This behavior can be filtered out in rss-filter.pl if you can figure out a good way.
• TODOs: easier running of the command

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to @caseybergman for the idea and @RobLanfear for sharing implementation details

🐘