OK Sushi

Embedding your Twitter timeline on your desktop

Posted on Monday August 18, 2008 in Life

Since I moved full-time to my new (shiny, beautiful) MacBook Pro, I have been tinkering with various solutions to my Twitter problem. I want to be able to update whenever I want, but I don’t want visual alerts that people I am following have posted. I would, however, like to have my timeline somewhere easy-to-see, so I don’t forget about it. Sound confusing? Perhaps.

So I came up with a quick and dirty solution to embed my Twitter timeline to my desktop.

  1. Download and install the Twitter gem for Ruby – a great little tool that allows you to use Twitter via the command line
  2. Download and install the GeekTool – a neat little app that allows you to embed the results of a shell action, files or pictures on your desktop
  3. Create a new console in GeekTool (of type Shell) with the following command:
    /usr/local/bin/twitter timeline
  4. Style accordingly

Enjoy

  1. Hey, I’ve just been getting into Geektool and saw this post. After getting the twitter gem working, I haven’t been able to get geektool to display the updates. I’ve had similar problems with geektool not displaying certain commands. How’d you get yours working?

    Thanks for the great guide. I’ve been looking for something like this for a while.

    Posted by jjhappypants on Oct 15, 06:05 AM

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