TwIRCd proxies Twitter through an IRC server, so that you can read, search and update Twitter using your IRC client. It is written for PHP 5.3 using an extensible architecture and does not require anything but the PHP socket extension.

Check out the repository, edit the server.php file, since you might want to change the IP and port TwIRCd listens on, and start the server using php server.php. Since this software is in an early stage it will currently log a lot to STDOUT. You probably just want to start it in screen, or change the Log level, like this:

$logger = new Logger\StdOut( E_WARNING | E_ERROR );

Now you can connect using any IRC client (or through a proxy like BIP) to the IRC server using your twitter credentials, like:

Nick

Your twitter user name; You won't be able to change your nick after connecting.

Ident / User

The microblogging client to use; Defaults to the only working on, for now: twitter.

Server password

Your twitter password

You will automatically join a channel called "&twitter" where all your friends should be listed as channel members. Your home timeline (the new friends timeline) will be posted into that channel. Everything you write into this channel will be posted back to twitter.

You can invite and kick users into / from the "&twitter" channel, to maintain your friendlist. /invite <user> will send a friend request to the twitter user specified by its its screen name. /kick <user will unfollow the user.

Most IRC GUI clients do have a GUI for kicking users, which you of course may also use for this.

If someone writes you a direct message, it will pop up as a query. Everything you answer into that query will be sent back as a direct message to the user.

You can join any channel, like "#php" and this will add a new search. By default it will search for the channel-name as a hash-tag. To change the exact search phrase update the topic of the channel. The following command will change the search to "#php OR #phpug", for example:

/TOPIC #php OR #phpug

You can join additional channels to create sub-groups of your friends. Just join a "local" channel, starting with an ampersand, like "&work", which will create a new group. You now may invite some of your friends, and their messages will be posted into the group channel and the timeline in "&twitter". The command used to invite users is /invite <user> where <user> is the twitter screen name. You can also kick users from the channel to remove them from the group.

To not hit the rate limit, TwIRCd automatically adapts the request rate depending on the rate limit twitter reports in its HTTP responses. Therefore the time between fetching new massages might vary slightly.

To change a settings value, query the "twircd" user. In the query the commands

$ set <key> <value>
$ get <key>

Are available. Settings keys may not contain white spaces.

Currently supported settings are:

avatar (true/false)

Switch on/off avatars for tweets. Default is false.

avatarHeight (int)

Set height (in lines) of twitter avatars. Default is 7.

Local Variables: mode: rst fill-column: 79 End: vim: et syn=rst tw=79