I have had no real urge to use twitter, and to this day I still don’t. Unfortunately, I know a few people who use only twitter to push updates. Originally, I had included the RSS feed of their timelines in my feed reader, but I had been finding it to be a touch too annoying to process the entries that way. I decided to bite the bullet and use a twitter client, that way I could also watch the build bots for a couple of projects I care about too.
And that is where the problems began. It turns out there are no clients that suit my needs. All I want is something fast, light, usable on my mobile devices, not too distracting and preferably not taking up an entire virtual desktop for the latest “Just had a coffee” incantation.
The closest I came to finding a usable client was with gwibber or twirssi,
gwibber didn’t quite work out because of a few show-stopper bugs when using it on my desktop, and some layout issues on my mobile devices. The package also appears to be in a state of serious flux right now, and hacking it on it to fix the bugs would be painful because of that. Plus the size of the changes to make it work correctly on my mobile devices would be immense, and that isn’t a fun prospect given that it is hosted on launchpad.
twirssi was ruled out because it required a very complex setup to use from my phone, with IRC proxies and an always on server connection to feed it. It is definitely a very cool project though, and I suspect it would quickly become my client of choice if I started to “use” twitter a lot.
The obvious answer to all this was to just make a little script to do exactly what I wanted... and bleeter was born. It isn’t pretty, it isn’t clean, it isn’t even that useful but it Works For Me™.