Featherdust: A simple Ruby gem for Twitter.

Featherdust (currently v 0.0.3) has been moved to Gemcutter. While I’ll still be pushing major updates to Rubyforge, the most up-to-date stable versions will be found on Gemcutter.

Of course, you can still get the bleeding-edge versions from Github if you want, but keep in mind that it’s likely going to be volatile.

Using Gemcutter

To set Gemcutter as your primary gem source, do the following:

gem install gemcutter
gem tumble

This will make your gem sources list look like:

*** CURRENT SOURCES ***

http://gemcutter.org
http://gems.rubyforge.org
http://gems.github.com

From here, you can run your normal sudo gem install featherdust command, and you’ll have the most recent version of Featherdust on your machine.

A Quick Reminder

If you run in to any issues using Featherdust, be sure to let me know, and I’ll address it as quickly as possible.

Installing Featherdust

To install Featherdust, just type the following in to whatever command line utility you prefer to use.

First you’ll need to make sure that GitHub is included in your repositories list (you only ever need to do this once, so if you’ve done it already skip ahead to the next step):

gem sources -a http://gems.github.com

Once that has run, type in

sudo gem install panpainter-featherdust

And you’re good to go!

Using Featherdust

The simplest way to use Featherdust at the moment is to, after requiring the gem, type in the following:

twitter = Featherdust.new("[your username]", [# of posts you want to display]) twitter.display_statuses

Of course, replacing anything inside of the square brackets with your preferred information.

A little more customization

You can also opt to have it display updates in plain text (it defaults to an HTML list, which makes it pretty unreadable in anything other than, well, HTML). The following code will get you the plain text version:

twitter = Featherdust.new("panpainter", 10, {:display => "plain"})

twitter.display_statuses

In conclusion …

This is a quick overview of how to install and use Featherdust, but it is by no means fully comprehensive. I’ll continue to post more how-to’s on using this gem, and I hope that this gem proves as useful for others as it has for me. If you find any bugs with the gem, please let me know over at this gem’s Lighthouse page.

Updates and Releases

Last Friday (December 19) I released Featherdust’s 0.0.3 alpha version on RubyForge. This version’s release is fully functional, with just two simple lines of code. But I’ll get to that shortly.

GitHub & the continuing maintenance of Featherdust

Featherdust will continue to be maintained, even though it was started as part of a class project, and of course this will continue to be the main location to get information about it. However, the code will be most current at it’s GitHub location.

Earlier today, I deployed Featherdust to RubyForge. It’s a REALLY alpha version of the gem, and a much better version will be getting deployed on Friday.