How to Install Twitalytic on DreamHost

One of my biggest frustrations with Twitter is that archives only go back 3,200 tweets, meaning that for now the entire first half of my Twitter history is totally inaccessible to me and everyone else. So I was pretty excited when blogger and hacker Gina Trapani announced her then-unnamed Twitalytic project.

Twitalytic—which Gina released as an alpha this week—is a PHP application that combats the disappearing tweet problem by archiving your tweets, plus all replies to them and all mentions of your Twitter name, and along the way aggregates meaningful data about your relationships, all on your own server.

Of course I set it up as soon as I got a chance. I could have installed it on one of my home machines, but I decided to put it on my public web space, which happens to be hosted on the cheap by DreamHost (disclosure: affiliate link). Being alpha software and pretty untested, setting Twitalytic up on DreamHost didn’t go entirely smoothly, but I got it working eventually. Since I’m sure others are struggling with the same task, I wrote up the method I used to get it working:

How to install Twitalytic on DreamHost.

I posted the instructions on Twitalytic’s GitHub wiki because I want other people to be able to improve and correct them, so if you see any errors or potential clarifications or simplifications, please edit the article and improve it.

P.S. Gina enthusiastically thanked me for posting the tutorial, but it’s worth quoting what she wrote on the Twitalytic home page: “Do not run on a public, production server. You have been warned.” Nevertheless, if you’re as determined to set it up as I was (and perhaps as foolish), I hope my instructions are useful to you.

“Send To” LiveJournal and Iterasi for Google Reader

I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback about my last two posts about adding Send To buttons to Google Reader for for Instapaper and Evernote, including links at my old stomping grounds ,Download Squad.

These articles are fun for me to write, so I’ll keep it up for the time being. In the Download Squad comments there were requests for instructions for LiveJournal and Iterasi. They both turned out to be easy enough, so read on for the instructions. Read the rest of this entry »

Evernote “Send To” button for Google Reader

I was thrilled to see that Kevin Purdy at Lifehacker picked up my Send-To-Instapaper tutorial for Google Reader. In the comments on his post, member “illadvised” asked, “Has anyone tried an Evernote ‘Send To’?” Great idea!

This one, as it turns out, is even easier than the one for Instapaper. Read the rest of this entry »

Instapaper “Send To” button for Google Reader

This week Google added a feature to Google Reader called “Send To” that lets you send a link to any feed item to various web services like Facebook, Digg, and Twitter. Very cool! But the coolest part is that they also made it easy to add other services to the mix–any service that will accept a HTTP GET request.

Already people are coming up with cool uses for this. Digital Inspiration, for example, shows you how to add a Send To link that’ll make a PDF document (via Lifehacker) out of the linked item.

My first thought, though, was to make a Send To link for Instapaper Read the rest of this entry »