Tool to manage tweets

Hello everyone,

I’d just like to share here this tool which seems like a neat way to manage the Twitter account of a collaborative effort like fortran-lang: github.com/gr2m/twitter-together. It allows for e.g. setting up a GitHub repo fortran-lang/fortran-lang-twitter or so and manage tweets with pull requests.

2 Likes

Indeed, we should use this to automate newsletters notifications–tweet on merged newsletter PR. I was looking into this exact project to do it, it just needs some work setting it up. Would you like to give it a shot?

Currently @certik and I manage the @fortranlang Twitter account. If anybody would like to join and help out, let us know.

1 Like

Not just the newsletter, but all tweets can be managed by this.

Any other news, like stdlib updates and so on can then be simply done by submitting a PR.

1 Like

Sure! I read the project and instructions and it seems like something I’d be able to set up. I will find time to have a draft before Monday if there are no objections :).

1 Like

PS: I would need you or @certik to follow these instructions on a new repo.

1 Like

For anything non-automated (other than a, say, a merged PR for a newsletter), this will be very counter-productive. Now every tweet will need a bureaucratic slog of a PR review and merge process.

I think time and energy will be better spent on the projects that really need it (stdlib, fpm, website, LFortran, proposals, etc.)

But if people wanna try it, I’m not opposed, just cautioning. :slight_smile:

1 Like

My suggestion for the time being is:

  • Automate specific project PR’s to go out as tweets using twitter-together;
  • Pick a person (or persons) that the community trusts to promote the fortran-lang work otherwise. Currently this is me but I’m happy to hand over the torch to a willing volunteer. Even better, we should rotate the people just like we’re doing with the monthly call organizers.
2 Likes

Perhaps it would be smoother to set it up primarily as a way to automate certain tweets that could be deployed from other repos. Whatever’s decided I’m happy to help setting it up (unless the task becomes too complicated for me to handle it :smile:).

I am a little worried about any automated tweets, unless they are send as a PR and manually approved. Maybe I don’t quite understand what you want to do. :slight_smile:

I was thinking that similarly to the #build_preview for the website, we would have a command #tweet_newsletter that would submit a PR to the Twitter repo, and someone would then quickly check it and approve it.

2 Likes

Yes, as long as we manually click merge, I am fine with any setup.

1 Like

You probably don’t even need a separate repo. You can set it up in the CI just like @pcosta explained with the #build_preview example, except that #tweet_newsletter would send the tweet on the manual PR merge of that specific PR (i.e. you don’t need a separate PR just for the tweet).

Then we could extend it to other projects like stdlib and fpm, so we can easily do the #tweet command in the PR, and when the PR is merged the bot tweets about it.

What I was opposing earlier is having a PR review process for every single tweet, which I think would not be efficient. But I may have misinterpreted Ondrej’s suggestion.

2 Likes

Sounds good! Perhaps at a later stage one could create a repo twitter-bot with the CI that could be loaded into the different fortran-lang projects as a git submodule or so. Anyway, I think it is a good idea to draft the automated workflow as @milancurcic suggested.

Yes I believe this is very doable. There’s a github action send-tweet-action that would make it easy to send a tweet by commenting in a PR, with for example:

#tweet
Check out the new Fortran newsletter etc.

I agree with @milancurcic, a PR for each tweet is unsustainable workload; a brief discussion of the tweet contents within the PR thread before publishing is necessary and sufficient IMO.

2 Likes

Nice. Thanks! Looks like a simple and effective way of doing it from within the PR. I hope to draft something and submit a PR implementing this on the weekend.

1 Like

made some progress but I think that it will be harder than I thought because of some limitations of GitHub actions, and workflows that are currently available.

3 Likes

For reference, here’s how Rust uses their Twitter:

1 Like

We should do that and retweet people who tag fortranlang.

Insipired by Rust’s Twitter and encouragement from this thread, I’ve been retweeting some helpful Fortran content and news from others. Please take a look: https://twitter.com/fortranlang. I now think this is what it should be–not just a platform for strictly fortran-lang news, but really a channel to promote and share any helpful Fortran news and resources, as well as to promote Fortran programmers and their projects.

I’d also like us to improve two things:

  1. Have a pretty banner (the rectangle above the logo). Perhaps this could be a screenshot of some nice and modern Fortran code, with colored syntax?
  2. Have a pinned tweet that explains how our Twitter works, just like Rust’s has.

What do you think?

3 Likes

Yes, I agree. In fact I think if you tag Rust, they will retweet you. So we should do the same here, to give voice to anybody who tags it, using our judgement of course. The other thing to do is search twitter for fortran related news and retweet if relevant.

I view fortran-lang in this broader sense, I want it to include all Fortran related news and resources.