Applications: Tweet Of The Day

Tweet Of The Day is a Windows application, written in Delphi, that lets you program your Twitter posts on a daily basis. This is good for marketing purposes, to post some technical content, or in any other situation in which you are using Twitter for non-personal purposes. The program lets you create a number of tweets for future dates (by default once a day) and all you have to do is keep the program running to see your tweets go live on the system.

More information on this blog post by Marco Cantu: blog.marcocantu.com/blog/delphi_rest_2_tweetoftheday.html.

Download

Current version is 0.2.

Disclaimer: This free software is provided as is, with no guarantee attached to it. Use it your own risk. Might not be fit to your needs. If you twitter too much, your account will be suspended. We won't be held responsible for anything the program does wrong, but it does nothing wrong, as far as we know!

The download file is here: delphitweetday_02.zip (about 720 KB).

Installation. The ZIP file includes an executable, place it anywhere on your disks. The INI file, though, must be in the user documents folder (like "Documents and Settings/user_name/Documents" on Windows XP or "/Users/user_name/Documents" on Widnows Vista). If not, you see an error on start up (along with an indication of where the program is looking for the fil eon your system!

Configuration: In the INI file set up your twitter account information and the name of the local database file to use (keeping the default will do). The database file will be added to the same documents folder of the INI file. Attention: You have to use your email as user name, not the twitter folder name!

Usage

Please report any bug to the author, in the blog post above or via email

1. The program has a list of tweets on the left. When the program starts this is filtered so that you see only tweets that have not been posted yet. Use the "filtered" check box to change that and see all past tweets sent by the program. (Of course, at the very beginning, this will be useless).

2. The form on the right has information about the current entry (existing or new) and you can use it to edit the actual Twitter post. A label will tell you have many characters you can still type. You can also change the date and time of the post (generally in the future).

3. To create a new post, use the corresponding button, not the database navigation toolbar (I know, I should remove that option). The new post will have an internal ID, will be dated one day after the last planned post or "now", whichever comes first. At the beginning of the post you'll see a sequence number.

4. You can post to Twitter using the corresponding button. This let's you repost a tweet you already posted, or one that didn't get posted because of an error ( the program might assume by mistake that a post was sent, disable fitlering to see them and repost).

5. You can see a log of the Twitter post output, but that's quite tecnical. In case of wrong credentials, though, it will be easy to spot the error message! As the program starts the program logs also configuration information.

6. You can turn on Automatic posting (check box). This is OFF by default. When it is on, every ten minutes the program check if there is a post that was not sent and is past due. In this case it sends it, than waits for another ten minutes...

7. Use the database navigator button to perform other operations, like deleting an entry, edit an old one, and so on. Again, don't use it to insert new records. Actually, you'll seldom need this navigator, as most operations (edit, post on next or on sending to Twitter) should just work as expected.

8. As you exit the program, the database table will be saved (in a simple ClientDataSet binary file). If you do many changes, hit the Save button. If the program (for any reason) crashes badly, your edits will get lost.