» tircd: Twitter from IRC

Twitter, yet another social network and instant messaging tool, yet another IM client with notifications. Annoying. Well there's an interesting alternative if you're already using an IRC client all the time, as I do.

tircd is a Twitter to IRC gateway, implemented as an IRC server. It runs on your workstation (or a server in your network), you connect to it from your favourite IRC client (e.g. irssi, xchat, konversation, weechat, ...) and can post your tweets as well as receive tweets from the persons you subscribed to.

Here is how to install it on openSUSE:
1. add the server:irc repository, e.g. like this for openSUSE 11.1:

zypper ar -r \
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/\
server:/irc/openSUSE_11.1/server:irc.repo

zypper ref

2. install the package tircd or, if you want tircd to start automatically at boot time, install the package tircd-daemon (which will also install the package tircd):

zypper in tircd-daemon

3. if you went with the latter option, start the daemon and activate the tircd init script to be run at boot:

rctircd start

chkconfig --add tircd

If you prefer to run tircd manually, open a shell with your regular user (not root) and do this:

tircd

4. in your favourite IRC client, connect to the tircd server running on localhost:6667, using your Twitter username as the IRC nick name, as well as sending your Twitter password to the server (note that the port number can be changed in /etc/tircd.cfg for manual start/stop, and in /etc/tircd-init.cfg when running tircd as a daemon). With irssi:

/connect localhost 6667 password username

5. then join the IRC channel named "#twitter" on that server, still in your IRC client:

/join #twitter

For further information, such as adding/banning people, please refer to the tircd website.