Follow Your Followers Using Ruby
20 May 2009
I have the following in a rake task run every 30 minutes. You'll need jnunemaker's twitter gem.
require 'twitter'
# Check out the twitter gem docs for using oauth
httpauth = Twitter::HTTPAuth.new("username", "password")
base = Twitter::Base.new(httpauth)
to_follow_ids = base.follower_ids - base.friend_ids
unavailable_count = 0
to_follow_ids.each do |tfid|
begin
base.friendship_create(tfid, true)
rescue Twitter::General
# Twitter::General is raised for 403 errors
# Which occur when you're trying to follow someone who's been banned by twitter
base.block(tfid)
rescue Twitter::Unavailable
# Wait and try again if twitter's telling you to wait
sleep 5
if unavailable_count < 3
retry
unavailable_count += 1
end
end
end