It was fun being interviewed by FiveRuns Blog. FiveRuns exists for the express purpose of delivering affordable and radically simplified tools for monitoring applications and their supporting infrastructure with a focus on Ruby on Rails.

Every Friday, FiveRuns interviews Ruby/Rails enthusiasts and it was an honor to be amongst luminaries such as Chad Fowler, Peter Cooper, Pat Eyler to name a few.

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

They say that Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app.

RubyForge has a command line interface and Ruby api wrapper for twitter.

I got hooked on to Twitter just today, when I came across this api. The documentation is not all that complete, given the fact that only John Nunemaker is working on this project. Nevertheless, let us see how this works.

To get started:

• First install the twitter gem by typing the following at the command prompt: gem install twitter
• The sample program mytwitter.rb below, is self explanatory

# mytwitter.rb
require 'twitter'

twitter = Twitter::Base.new('your_username', 'your_password')

# to make a post
twitter.post('Posting this message from a Ruby program!')

# returns an array of users who are in your friends list
puts '', "Your Friends", "=" * 50
twitter.friends.each do |u|
  puts u.name, u.status.text
  puts
end

Have fun!

Sunil Kelkar is an Indian Rails enthusiast and has been working with Rails for the last two years. With the number of Rails based projects booming in India, Sunil decided to pass on his Rails experience to would-be Rails enthusiasts by offering a Free Online Introductory ROR Course. This course starts from 12th April 2008 and going by Rails popularity, I am sure 100s would join.

I am helping him set up the course using Moodle software, based on my experience with the same, for my Ruby Programming course.

Sunil, my best wishes for the course.

Jimmy Atkinson the founder of WHDb has published a feature article, “Learn Programming Online, For Free“. In this article, they have listed a total of 77 free open course-ware collections that teach Ajax, C++, PHP, Ruby, and many more Web programming languages.