Fritter - a miniscule free twitter replacement

#!/usr/bin/env python

import datetime
import time
import urllib2

def once(conf, tweets):
    for line in conf:
        line = line.replace("\r","").replace("\n", "")
        host, person = line.split()
        url = "http://{0}/~{1}/fritter.txt".format(host, person)
        f = urllib2.urlopen(url)
        tweet = f.read()
        print_tweet = True
        if tweets.has_key(url):
            if tweets[url] == tweet: print_tweet = False
        tweets[url] = tweet
        if print_tweet:
            print "At {0}, {1} at {2} wrote:".format(datetime.datetime.now(), person, host)
            print tweet




# read configuration file
conf = file("fritter.conf","r").read().splitlines()
tweets = {}
while(True):
    once(conf, tweets)
    time.sleep(5)