Posting Blog Posts as Twitter Threads Part 1/n

Why? Eh, no good reason, but should be fun.

Plan of Action

I recently shifted my website to a static site generator I wrote specifically for myself. Thus, it should be easy to just add a feature to check for new posts, split the text into chunks for Twitter threads and tweet them. I am not handling lists or images right now.

Time to Code

First, the dependency: tweepy for tweeting.

pip install tweepy

import os
import tweepy

consumer_key = os.environ["consumer_key"]
consumer_secret = os.environ["consumer_secret"]

access_token = os.environ["access_token"]
access_token_secret = os.environ["access_token_secret"]

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)

api = tweepy.API(auth)

The program need to convert the blog post into text fragments.

It reads the markdown file, removes the top YAML content, checks for headers and splits the content.

tweets = []

first___n = 0

with open(sample_markdown_file) as f:
    for line in f.readlines():
        if first___n <= 1:
            if line == "---\n":
                first___n += 1
            continue
        line = line.strip()
        line += " "
        if "#" in line:
            line = line.replace("#","")
            line.strip()
            line = "\n" + line
            line += "\n\n"
        try:
            if len(tweets[-1]) < 260 and (len(tweets[-1]) + len(line)) <= 260:
                tweets[-1] += line
            else:
                tweets.append(line)
        except IndexError:
            if len(line) > 260:
                print("ERROR")
            else:
                tweets.append(line)

Every status update using tweepy has an id attached to it, for the next tweet in the thread, it adds that ID while calling the function.

For every tweet fragment, it also appends 1/n.

for idx, tweet in enumerate(tweets):
    tweet += " {}/{}".format(idx+1,len(tweets))
    if idx == 0:
        a = None
        a = api.update_status(tweet)
    else:
        a = api.update_status(tweet,in_reply_to_status_id=a.id)
    print(len(tweet),end=" ")
    print("{}/{}\n".format(idx+1,len(tweets)))

Finally, it replies to the last tweet in the thread with the link of the post.

api.update_status("Web Version: {}".format(post_link))

Result

Posting Blog Posts as Twitter Threads Part 1/n

Why? Eh, no good reason, but should be fun.
Plan of Action

I recently shifted my website to a static site generator I wrote specifically for myself. 1/5

— Navan Chauhan (@navanchauhan) June 24, 2021

Web Version: https://t.co/zROU1F5DYv

— Navan Chauhan (@navanchauhan) June 24, 2021

What's Next?

For the next part, I will try to append the code as well. I actually added the code to this post after running the program.

If you have scrolled this far, consider subscribing to my mailing list here. You can subscribe to either a specific type of post you are interested in, or subscribe to everything with the "Everything" list.