FiveRuns Blog

The FiveRuns dev and support teams live in Campfire.

As I wrote a while back, our Campfire ‘Development’ room is constantly filled with team chat, subversion/git commit messages, and CruiseControl build statuses. Piping all of this information into one centralized team-viewable location has been awesomely valuable. That being said, we’ve kicked it up a notch.

Say hi to CampTweet.

This simple Ruby script broadcasts your Twitter statuses (tweets), Summize Twitter search results, and RSS/Atom feed items into the Campfire room of your choice.

Here’s how you can use it on your team.

1. Install the gem

sudo gem install camptweet

2. Generate the camptweet daemon script

camptweet .

This will generate a camptweetd file in the current directory. By default, the meat of it looks like this:

Camptweet::Bot.new do |camptweet|
  camptweet.twitter_users = ['bdainton']
  camptweet.twitter_search_terms = ['fiveruns']
  camptweet.feed_urls = ['http://github.com/repositories.atom']
  camptweet.campfire_subdomain = 'mycompany'
  camptweet.campfire_use_ssl = true
  camptweet.campfire_room = 'Room Name'  
  camptweet.campfire_email = 'foo@mycompany.com'
  camptweet.campfire_password = 'foo_password'
  camptweet.verbose = false
  camptweet.logfile = 'camptweet.log'
end.run

Update the above config to list the Twitter screen names of your team members, the simple (one-word) terms for which you’d like to search on Summize, and any RSS/Atom feeds for which you’d like the latest items in the feed to be pumped into Campfire.

3. Start up the script

nohup ./camptweetd &

That’s it.

Here at FiveRuns, we’ve been using this tool to centralize our team tweets, product and company mentions on Twitter, and a number of dev-and-support-relevant feeds (including project card updates in Mingle, forum and GetSatisfaction activity, and build system status).

If your team is using Campfire, give CampTweet a try. It’s neat.