Ubuntu Tips n Tricks: Newsletter

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

How to Display Twitter Statuses/Updates on Conky

Posted: 15 Jul 2009 07:02 AM PDT

Do you want to display your friends' Twitter statuses/updates on your conky desktop system monitor? If you want to then I'll show the way to easily do it without having to install additional modules. Here's how:

1. The first thing that you need to do is of course install/set-up conky.

2. Next up, edit your conky config file with your favorite text editor:

gedit ~/.conkyrc

3. From the config file, find the 'TEXT' section and under it you can add the following:

${rss http://your_twitter_username:your_twitter_password@twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/your_number.rss 20 item_titles 5}

But before that, let me explain it to you:

As indicated above, you should provide your own Twitter username, password, and that number before ".rss". Now where do we find that number?

Easy, just go to your Twitter homepage (mine is at http://twitter.com/junauza) and click on your RSS feed link that can be found at the lower portion of the sidebar:

From your RSS feeds page, locate that number from your web browser's URL/Address Bar, then copy and paste it:

Let me show you my configuration:

${rss http://junauza:mypasswrd@twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/14349540.rss 20 item_titles 8}

4. Don't forget to save, restart conky, and see the result.

You can provide the number of statuses that you want to display by editing item_titles. Like I changed mine to 8.

The number 20 indicates that the RSS feed will update at 20 minute intervals. I would suggest that you keep it above 20 minutes especially if you are using other Twitter desktop clients in order to avoid reaching the API limits and to stay away from congestion.

Enjoy!