
Show HN: Tweeting Hemingway's "The Old Man an the Sea" sentence by sentence  - soneca
https://twitter.com/sbsHemingway
======
soneca
Creator of this here.

If anyone is interested, this is how I created this twitter account
automatically tweeting every single sentence of "The Old Man and the Sea" by
Ernest Hemingway.

It is rather simple actually, i just used Excel > Google Spreadsheet (with its
script tool) > Zapier > Buffer.

Excel to get a text copied from a PDF, concatenate (as it is divided by lines,
rather than sentences), then separating it in sentences and finally dividing
the sentences by 140 characters (one tweet). And yes, I did chose Hemingway
because he uses short sentences.

Then I created two sheets on Google Drive Spreadsheet. One with all tweets on
a single colunm. Other with the new tweets. I created a script to copy each
tweet from the "all tweets" sheet to the "new tweets" sheet, one by one, on a
appended row, every 2 hours.

This is because Zapier needs a "trigger" to perform its tasks. So the _zap_
here is every new row added on "new tweets" sheet, it will send it to the my
tweets line on Buffer.

Finally, I scheduled Buffer to tweet 12 times a day. A not so flooded schedule
I guess, but still able to tweet the whole book (2017 tweets) in less than 6
months.

So, follow if you will, it was a fun way to find out what I could with Zapier
actually.

~~~
bryanh
Zapier co-founder here, this is incredible! It is fun and humbling to see
people doing stuff I never would have predicted when we started Zapier.

Thanks for sharing. :-)

~~~
soneca
Sure, and congrats for Zapier!

My own feedback: include a feature to perform a task with a timer, not a
trigger. It Google spreadsheet didn't have this "script tool" with a timer for
running functions, this wouldn't be possible, even with Zapier.

~~~
bryanh
Great suggestion, I'll bring it up with the team and see if we could arrange
something.

