Follow Euro 2008 on Twitter
After my friend Paul asked me to text him updates from a Euro 2008 game while he was at work, I came up with the idea to set up a twitter bot that posted updates from Soccernet’s gamecasts. After a couple hours of work, using Hpricot and the Twitter gem, I was able to build a Ruby script that worked pretty well. I’m planning on posting a complete post on how I did it, but first I want to work some of the kinks out. There are three twitter accounts you can follow if you’re interested:
- @euro2008cup - All updates from the gamecast (about one post per minute in the game). Tweets are shortened with a link to the full update.
- @euro2008scores - Only updates from the gamecast that are marked as “alerts” (goals, for the most part). Like @euro2008cup, updates are shortened.
- @euro2008sms - This has the same updates as @euro2008scores, but updates longer than 140 characters span across multiple tweets. This is best if you want to follow on your phone, as you’ll get the full update instead of having to click on a link.
Hopefully these will help someone out. Like, I said, I’ll be posting a how to on making your own twitter bot and screen scraper, so keep an eye out for that.