A few weeks ago, I ask in a post the (simple) question “dear reader, who are you?” just to know more about the readers of my blog. I found that extremely interesting (even if – to be honest – I was expecting more answers to start a more serious sociological study of the readers of my blog). And an interesting point was that a lot of readers of my blog come to read the “somewhere else” posts, which is a review of interesting posts and articles found on the internet. Those links I share actually come from my tweets. I have on my blog a backup of my tweets, and usually, that’s where I go if I want to find some article, or some graph, or some map I have in mind, that I’ve seen somewhere (but usually I can’t remember where). But most of the time, I feel bored, because there is nothing new: it is simply a copy and paste from my tweets.

And this afternoon @tomroud asked how those posts were written: was there an automatic procedure, or was I doing it manually? Until tonight, I was doing it manually. But because it was some kind of stupid challenge, I did try to produce a code that will generate a simple list of my tweets that I can use to produce a post.

Continue reading An automatic code to extract tweets (and to produce the “Somewhere else” review) →