How to Write a Follower Feed in Ruby

If you want to see posts for accounts you're following, you can just use the Home (/feed) link on steemit.com. But what if you want to see all posts and comments for accounts who follow you? This is how to create a follower feed.

As always, we use Radiator with bundler. You can get bundler with this command:

$ gem install bundler

I've tested it on various versions of ruby. The oldest one I got it to work was:

ruby 2.0.0p645 (2015-04-13 revision 50299) [x86_64-darwin14.4.0]

First, make a project folder:

$ mkdir radiator
$ cd radiator

Create a file named Gemfile containing:

source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem 'radiator', github: 'inertia186/radiator'

Then run the command:

$ bundle install

Create a file named follower_latest_posts.rb containing:

require 'rubygems'
require 'bundler/setup'

Bundler.require

puts "Usage: ruby #{__FILE__}  [max_hours]" and return if ARGV.empty?

api = Radiator::FollowApi.new
followers = []
count = -1
account, max_hours = ARGV
max_hours ||= 0.25

until count == followers.size
  count = followers.size
  response = api.get_followers(account, followers.last, 'blog', 100)
  followers += response.result.map(&:follower)
  followers = followers.uniq
  sleep 1
end

api = Radiator::Api.new
response = api.get_accounts(followers)
followers = response.result.sort_by do |follower|
  follower.last_post
end.reverse

followers.each do |follower|
  seconds = Time.now - Time.parse(follower.last_post + " UTC")
  exit if seconds > max_hours.to_f * 3600
  minutes = "%.1f" % (seconds / 60)
  puts "https://steemit.com/@#{follower.name}/posts (#{minutes} minutes ago)"
end

Then run it:

$ ruby follower_latest_posts.rb ned

You can optionally create a bash script to automatically refresh the results every 15 seconds. Create a file named follower_feed.sh:

#!/bin/bash

while :
do
  output="`ruby follower_latest_posts.rb $@`"
  clear
  echo "$output"
  sleep 15
done

Then run it:

$ chmod +x follower_feed.sh
$ ./follower_feed.sh ned

The output will be something like this:

https://steemit.com/@steevc/posts (0.5 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@michelle.gent/posts (0.6 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@maarnio/posts (0.7 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@chadcrypto/posts (0.8 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@stellabelle/posts (1.0 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@daveks/posts (2.1 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@ltm/posts (2.2 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@mammasitta/posts (2.4 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@aggroed/posts (2.8 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@lifeworship/posts (2.9 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@kevinwong/posts (3.2 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@sharker/posts (3.4 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@stephenkendal/posts (4.0 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@villainblack/posts (4.9 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@papa-pepper/posts (5.6 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@runridefly/posts (6.1 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@doitvoluntarily/posts (6.3 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@gringalicious/posts (8.1 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@rossenpavlov/posts (9.5 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@ausbitbank/posts (9.6 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@funnyman/posts (10.4 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@moon32walker/posts (11.1 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@argsolver/posts (11.3 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@dwinblood/posts (12.7 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@gardenofeden/posts (13.0 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@james-show/posts (14.6 minutes ago)
https://steemit.com/@dajohns1420/posts (14.9 minutes ago)

See my previous Ruby How To posts in: #radiator #ruby