This won’t work anymore, digest auth is not supported by twitter so see the solution by lostman to get OAuth-capable client!

Update: On Oct 29 2011 I have shut down the twitter account. Here’s how it looked like:

Have you ever thought of your router twitting status updates? E.g. if the connection goes down and comes back you are notified right away in a light-weight fashion.

Never?

Nevermind, here’s how to do that:

1. Create an account on twitter.

2. Create a Basic authentication string with

   echo -n "$username:$password" | base64
   

3. Use the following shell script, substituting $base64string with the string obtained in previous step:

   #!/bin/sh
   
   TWEET="status=$*"
   
   CONTENT_LENGTH=`echo -n $TWEET | wc -c`
   
   MESSAGE="
   POST /statuses/update.xml HTTP/1.1
   Host: twitter.com
   User-Agent: OpenWRT Twitter
   Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*
   Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
   Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
   Content-Length: $CONTENT_LENGTH
   Authorization: Basic $base64string
   
   $TWEET"
   
   echo "$MESSAGE" | telnet twitter.com 80 > /dev/null 2>/dev/null
   

4. Save it as /usr/bin/tweet and start using it right away.

5. Set up some cron job, make it log something and... follow your router :)

You can follow my router, just in case :)