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DIY Scheduling automatic tweets with WordPress links and hashtags

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I have recently blogged about moving WordPress away from a CPanel managed domain to a self-managed Ubuntu server. I wanted a faster server with a free encrypted SSL certificate, no usage capacity limits (that I had on CPanel host) on server capacity and improve SEO. This guide aims to automate tweets with links to existing blog posts based on recent twitter command line research. I plan on using the Ubuntu crontab to schedule bash scripts to automate sending tweets. I plan on automating tweets with this GitHub repo: https://github.com/sferik/t every 6 hours.

Source posts for automation

I have the Yoast SEO plugin installed in WordPress and it automatically creates a Pages and Posts sitemaps when new content is posted in WordPress. I used to choose Pages and Posts for publishing WordPress content but recently switched to using Posts only.

Here are my websites sitemaps XML files.

My Sitemap XML’s

Sitemaps

I plan on automating tweets from random pages in https://fearby.com/post-sitemap.xml

More on setting up the Twitter command line utility here.

Test tweeting from a bash file

FYI: real twitter accounts have been renamed below in all output below to @twitteraccount01 and @twitteraccount02

I created a bash file to handle the logic for automation

I tested the bash files ability to send a tweet

I made the file executable

I tested the script

The bash script sent a text message 🙂

Test Tweet

Now it is time to authorize a second twitter account with the t utility (see this guide for help creating a Twitter app and linking it to t).

Summary:

  • Goto https://apps.twitter.com/ and log in with the right Twitter account.
  • Create a new app.
  • I had to link my twitter account to a mobile number before I could create the app.
  • Set twitter app permissions: Read, Write and Access direct messages.

I ran these commands to Authorize a second twitter account in t

I can now see I have two Twitter accounts added to t

Now let’s see if we can tweet to the new twitter account (while keeping the old account linked): https://www.twitter.com/FearbySoftware

I edited the bash script to have a different message to tweet.

Success

Test Tweet

https://github.com/sferik/t suggests I can set the active Twitter account by entering the following command before tweeting

You can find linked twitter account usernames and id’s by running

I have updated the /scripts/tweetrandomblogarticle.sh  file to switch active accounts before tweeting

I ran the bash file to test sending multiple tweets from different accounts

Success

Processing the sitemaps file

At this point, I realized I have setup t on a different server than the server with sitemaps.xml. This is not a problem, I can easily download the sitemaps file onto this server with curl and process the XML with bash before tweeting.

Downloading the XML file

Now what does the XML Sitemaps file look like (Important for processing)

XML Sitemap Contents:

Processing the XML file

Here is my final bash script that manages temp files, downloads a sitemap, finds URLs in the Sitemap, chooses a random article, loads the page to get the title, finds hashtags and posts a tweet.

Final script with hashtag routine.

Hashtags

I added custom hashtags routine to the tweets body depending on the article url by adding the code below over the hashtag=”codetba” placeholder above.

Automation

This is how I scheduled the auto-tweet in the crontab (every 6 hours (0:00 6:00 12:00 18:00)).

Pros

  • Automated
  • Does what I want

Cons

  • I have to add new URLs in order to add hashtags

Hope this helps.

Need a server?

Set up a Server on Vultr here for as low as $2.5 a month or set up a Server on Digital Ocean (and get the first 2 months free ($5/m server)). I have a guide on setting up a Vultr server here or Digital Ocean server here.  Don’t forget to add a free LetsEncrypt SSL Certificate and secure the server (read more here and here).

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Revision History

v1.1 Revised (24th Sep 2017)

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