You gotta know a lot... »

So I've finally released a first version of the "email to twitter" service I've been mentioning here the last few days...you can check it out at pu.ly (and please do when you have a free second or two).

Anyway, since releasing it today to the world (and then crashing it a few times while attempting upgrades!)...people brought a few existing alternatives to my attention...the short list includes:

• topify.com


• twittermail.com


• emailtwitter.com


• messagedance.com

1. Perl - which I use to do the batch processing for monitoring twitter and parsing incoming emails


2. DBI - perl's database library


3. LWP - A perl library used for HTTP communications


4. PHP - which I use for the front end code of the web site (and to communicate with twitter when initially approving the app)


5. Curl - used by PHP for HTTP communications


6. Subversion - the version control software I use to manage releases and file transfers between my development environments and my production servers (as you can probably guess based on the fact I crashed the service a bunch throughout the day, I do not have a test environment; so it goes straight from dev to production - blech - but I work with what I got in my own little budget-conscious world)


7. SSH - How I connect to my Linux production servers (on slicehost btw). I generally use putty for this on Windows or the Terminal app on Mac


8. Photoshop - which I used to create any front end graphics (in this case it was only the pu.ly logo)


9. HTML - used for all the front end display of the web site


10. CSS - used to help improve the look of the front end web site


11. XML - The format data is passed in between Twitter and my scripts


12. JSON - The other format data is passed in between Twitter and my scripts


13. OAuth - The security protocol/standard Twitter uses to authorize applications (ie. so
    
    pu.ly can tweet on your behalf without you having to give us your actual username/password)
    
    


14. PostgreSQL - The database system that account information and long tweets are stored in


15. SQL - the query language used to insert into and pull data out from a database.


16. Apache - The web server software that runs the front end web site.


17. Mod_Rewrite - an apache module that helps route requests to the proper places within my web application.


18. Linux - The operating system that the scripts, database, and web site all run on.


19. postfix - The email server software that all the email involved in this system routes through


20. crontab - A linux system that let's you schedule programs to run (ie. controls when the batch scripts actually get executed)


21. mysql - A database system that, in this case, interacts with Postfix to manage email accounts