carpeaqua

If you follow me on Twitter you probably know that I have a bit of a problem with my mentions feed being inundated with misfired tweets to young pop stars. When Tweetbot for iOS started offering filtering of your mentions based on a keyword, I was overjoyed. Even more, I was happy to see they also offered support for filtering using regular expressions.

Regular expressions are complex and strange looking strings of text that can be used to search a run of text for a specific pattern match. With normal search I could do a filter for the word ‘Bieber’ and have it hide any mention that contained his last name. With a regular expression however, I can do a filter that matches any variation of spelling that closely matches his actual last name.¹

There are a variety of other useful regular expression filters that can be applied to Tweetbot, so I decided to start aggregating them on Github. The project is called SilencedBots and I hope that it can someday become a pretty nice resource for filtering all the stuff you don’t care about in order to focus on what really matters in your tweet stream. Since everything is on Github, it is open to submissions from anyone. Jordan Kay has made quite a few enhancements already.

Long-term I’ve got ideas on how to easily import filters into Tweetbot without having to do the clumsy copy/paste dance. Whether I find the time to pursue those ideas is another story. Such is the life of a software developer.