Catfood is now on Google+. Once 50 people have the Catfood Software page added to a circle I’ll host a Hangout. You can ask me anything about Catfood, request features or nag me about bugs.
I’ve just released a small update to Catfood Cleat, my command line client for Twitter. 1.10 supports geolocation (you can include a longitude and latitude with the tweet) and timestamps (current date and time appended to the end of the tweet).
Spring starts right now in the northern hemisphere, Autumn if you’re south of the equator. Image rendered using Catfood Earth.
I’ve just released Catfood PdfScan 1.40. This is a minor update that fixes a few bugs: crash on load checking for product updates when the Catfood web site is unavailable and crash when trying to set the image quality on a scanner that does not support this capability. This is a recommended update for all scanners of PDFs.
Mashable published an article by Christine Erickson today on whether small businesses should automatically follow back on Twitter. The article and comments just cover the extreme positions, automatically following everyone or manual follower management.
Some companies can get away with not following anyone, or maybe just following related accounts, but in most cases a business wants to engage with their followers.
Catfood Follower provides a third way thanks to integration with Klout. You can automatically follow anyone with a high enough Klout score. This helps weed spam and bots out of your stream (and following list) while ensuring that you follow authentic and influential accounts.
Catfood.net will be dark on January 18, 2012 to protest against SOPA and PIPA. Learn more on my personal blog.
I’ve just released Catfood Cleat, a tool that tweets from the Windows command line.
Use cleat to automate tweets from Task Scheduler, tweet from batch files, or just when you want to share without leaving the console.
Cleat supports multiple Twitter accounts and will automatically shorten tweets to 140 characters if necessary so you don’t need to worry about the exact length when using Cleat for automation.
Download Cleat and let me know what you think.
It’s the start of Winter in the Northern Hemisphere, Summer if you’re of the negative latitude persuasion. Image rendered using Catfood Earth.
Catfood Follower 1.40 is now available for download.
Follower is now integrated with Klout, a service that measures the influence of Twitter users with a score ranging from 0-100. You can choose to only follow people above a certain Klout score, or to remove followers below a certain Klout score.
I’ve also added support for using Twitter Lists as unfollow exceptions. This is much easier than remembering to run Follower and add an exception for each account that you want to always follow. Just add people to a private ‘don’t unfollow’ list and then check this off in Follower Settings. You can add as many lists as you like as unfollow exceptions.
1.40 also includes a big performance boost. Under the covers accounts are now processed using Twitter APIs that return up to 5,000 friends or followers at a time. Before 1.40 Follower would process around 200 accounts per API call. This change means that Follower runs faster and is less likely to hit Twitter call limits.
If you already use Follower upgrade today. If not, and you’re looking for a way to manage your Twitter account check it out and read Getting the most out of Catfood Follower.
I’m close to releasing a new version of Catfood Follower.
The update has some cool new features including Klout integration and a switch to bulk twitter APIs that allow the follow engine to run much more quickly. I’ve also mopped up several bugs and generally tidied up the interface.
Download Catfood Follower 1.40 Beta and leave a comment below if you have any problems, questions or suggestions. Thanks.
(Updated 2011-10-22: 1.40.0136, improves Klout integration so that processing an account does not fail because of temporary Klout failures.