As you can see on the sidebar, I use Twitter.  I think it’s cool but I know that it took me a while to “get it” and I know many people who still don’t get it.  But I can’t explain what “it” is.

I tweet pretty much from the command line.  A simple google search will help you figure it out, but for the impatient, I do:

curl --basic --user username:passwd --data status="my update" \

http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

Of course, I am not going to type that in every time.  This is too complicated for an alias.  A lot of people would then put this into a script, but I don’t like one or two loner scripts. I find functions much better for this kind of thing.  So this is in my ~/.aliases file:

function tweet() {
curl --basic --user username:passwd --data status=\"$1\" \

http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

}

The $1 is where my status update would be. So then I do:

tweet "this is my status"

And then I get some XML back that confirmed my status change.