I really like the fact that I’m able to get notifications of changes to the HTML5 draft through the WHATWG twitter account, so over the weekend — inspired by that and working from an initial code fragment that Hixie sent me that help me get started — I wrote a simple Perl script that watches in (reasonably) near-real time for new checkins/commits to a particular Subversion repository, then takes the change description for each new checkin, re-formats it a bit, and finally posts it as a status-message/tweet to a Twitter account.

I guess the script could be of some general use, but the main reason I wrote it was to be able to have another way (that is, other than e-mail) to keep up with checkins to the WebKit code repository. So I took the liberty of creating a WebKit user at Twitter (username: webkit) and configured things such that the results end up there. If you’re interested, head over and take a look.

I’m not a member of the WebKit project, and don’t want to be the real owner for that Twitter account, so next step is hopefully to hand over the keys for it to one of the WebKit project leads. It may be that the project could want to have a webkit Twitter account for some other purpose (what else it could be useful for, I’m not sure, but maybe something), and have the changes go to a different account. If so, I’m happy to change the setup. Initially, I actually tried to create an account with the username webkit-changes — to match the mailing list of the same name, and to make the purpose of the account clear — but Twitter unfortunately doesn’t seem to allow usernames with dashes in them… I guess webkit_changes or webkitchanges are other options, though neither seems very attractive.