RSS to Twitter - turning website updates into automated tweets, with IFTTT

Some Twitter accounts are broadcast-only (they send tweets but there isn't a person behind the account typing out these tweets) and they're useful for getting news feeds from various websites and sources.

There are several ways of creating one of these "bots" (Twitter robots, automated accounts) - you don't need to know how to program and you don't need your own server.

Probably the easiest way to set up such a Twitter account is to use the free IFTTT service (which stands for 'IF This, Then That'). If a website has an RSS feed (look for an orange square icon with a radiating white pattern) then you can use that to set up a system that will ping out a tweet for you.

You will need

• an input, in this case an RSS feed
• an output - a spare Twitter account

To make your own Twitter feed based on an RSS feed you can use an IFTTT recipe that converts RSS feed items into tweets, it's called RSS to Twitter.

The steps are

1. Create your spare Twitter account and log in
2. Create an IFTTT account and log in there too
3. While logged into both IFTTT and Twitter go to https://ifttt.com/twitter and activate Twitter as a channel (this will be your output) you probably won't need to activate RSS as a separate channel but just in case its https://ifttt.com/feed

Here's an example from one that I've made, the @moviesinconcert feed for the Movies in Concert website - my IFTTT 'recipe' is a modified version of the RSS to Twitter recipe, it's at https://ifttt.com/recipes/262124-film-music-concert-info-from-movies-in-concert-rss-to-twitter

#filmmusic: (Brooklyn, New York / USA) 07.10.2015 - Doctor Who Symphonic Spectacular http://t.co/DV0E1kByrn The Doctor Who Symphonic Spec…

— Movies in Concert (@moviesinconcert) May 2, 2015

Here’s what it looks like under the bonnet with the RSS feed as the ‘trigger’ causing the action of sending out a tweet. I’ve added the hashtag #filmmusic and asked the recipe to publish this along with the title of the update from Movies in Concert along with the address (Entry URL) and the first line of the page.

If you click into the lower box it looks like this and you can click on the blue ‘science flask’ icon to change the options, this will change what the tweets look like.

Workarounds for people who used RSS feeds from Twitter - and now can't

Edit: 12 June 2013 - Twitter has now killed off all RSS feeds as far as I can tell. 

Today is the day that Twitter apparently switches off support for RSS feeds that take content from Twitter and let people read it somewhere else (however anything that takes RSS feeds from somewhere else and sends them to Twitter is fine - this is how @DiabetesTrials works, using an RSS output from the ClinicalTrials.gov website, via Feedburner into that dedicated Twitter feed - all automatically, set it up years ago).

Most people won't care that the RSS feed outputs from Twitter have been stopped as people generally use the really nice widgets that Twitter provide - if you've ever been on a website and seen a little panel of 'latest tweets' that's what they're using and you can get your own at https://twitter.com/settings/widgets/new

Some people though will have set things up years ago to take an RSS feed from a user, search result (eg hashtag) or something else and send it to their website or RSS reader - at some point this will suddenly stop working. Assuming they notice they might not know how to fix it. RSS, standing as it does for 'really simple syndication', was extremely easy to use and 'portable' - you didn't really need to know much techy stuff beyond knowing how to click a button or use copy and paste to get a feed up and running.

I'm curious to know what easy workarounds there might be, if any, for people who've found that stuff they previously did with RSS isn't going to work much longer.

Back in October 2012 I wrote this post "Has Twitter killed RSS feeds yet? Possibly not, but not working awfully well" and it's had over 5,000 views which is off-scale for any of my blog posts (although my most popular, with almost 100,000 views is the one about what happens when you block someone on Twitter!) as most of them get in the low 100s. From the comments it seems a few people will be a bit annoyed, unless they've found alternative. What are those alternatives?

I have put out a call for problems that people have experienced, and any solutions! Please send yours :)

Case 1 - staff intranet
An organisation has a staff intranet and there's an RSS feed from the company account that goes to the intranet - this lets staff see what's being discussed. The RSS feed has been replaced with a bit of code (if I can get hold of it, and permission, I'll post it here).
Solution: problem solved

Case 2 - Following lists by RSS
Used to be possible, RSS support for lists has already been switched off and no plans to reimplement it.
Solution: unknown
Interim: Twitter's widgets allow you to add a list's tweets to your website. This is also easy on things like Blogger (just select a new html/javascript 'gadget' from Design / Layout / Add a Gadget) though from previous experience it's impossible on a Wordpress.com website (fine on WP.org self-hosted).

Case 3 - Reading tweets in an RSS newsreader, such as Google Reader
It's expected that Twitter will switch off support for all other RSS feeds (user timeline, mentions, search etc) today in which case, if that happens, the RSS feeds will simply stop and be unavailable to Google Reader etc. If someone is using Google Reader to read a collection of feeds, which until now had included Twitter feeds, they might be quite reluctant to move to a different way of reading them.
Solution: unknown
Interim: as above, Twitter lets you add a widget to your own website for user timeline | favorites | list | search but I think this is just your own tweets, faves etc.

Another solution is to read tweets by email using Twilert which will send you a daily email. Use the advanced search options to 'search for', 'From' (ie a user's timeline) or 'To' (ie at-mentions)

Case 4 - An embed-your-tweets into Wordpress.org widget
From @alexmoss writing here "I am the developer of the Twitter Feed Plugin for WordPress (http://3doordigital.com/wordpress/plugins/wp-twitter-feed/). It has been downloaded over 80,000 times and is powered completely by the RSS feed. This process suddenly changing will affect a lot of WordPress sites if not supported in the same way." 
Solution: after some to-ing and fro-ing on the discussion page Alex mentioned that he'd found a workaround for the problem, though I have no understanding of what he's done -

"I eventually ended up developing an updated version that uses the embedded timeline but also developed Twitter Feed Pro that uses the new API to output the tweets the way they used to. It was a shame as a lot of webmasters will not understand the implications of turning off the RSS feed."

Interim: not sure but person from Twitter responded with some information about how to GET statuses/user_timeline, unfortunately I've not worked out what it means yet either. But if it's as simple as just using a different web addrress then I'm all for it.

Things to investigate, though I don't understand much that's on these pages:
User timeline: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/statuses/user_timeline
Search: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/search/tweets
Favorites: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/favorites/list
Lists: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/favorites/list (same link as favorites)
Embedded timelines: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/embedded-timelines 

A friend of mine has been doing some API tweaking for Errordiary so I shall ask him more about how one does this, but I suspect coding skills are needed whereas RSS just sort of magically appeared, hidden behind a little orange button and was pretty easy to implement for most people.


Case 5 - your own tragic tale of RSS woe
Ping them over, let's find solutions and workarounds. Thanks :)

How to grab the RSS feed from a Blogger tag

How to get an update whenever a new post on Blogger is tagged with a keyword of interest

Blogger calls tags on posts 'labels' for some reason, though it doesn't appear to have cottoned on for the need for categories as well (or I've not found out how to do that).

The labels for this post are howto (as in 'how to' do something), RSS and tags and can be seen below.

If you were interested in getting an RSS feed that would let you keep an eye only on the posts on this blog that included 'how to' instructions for something, the link you'd want would be:

http://brodiesnotes.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/howto

Generic version http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/labelname
- put the relevant blog name in the bit in bold and change the labelname bit to the tag / label of your choice.

You can add this feed URL to any RSS reader that you use (for automatic updating purposes) or just bookmark it and view it periodically in a web browser (no use for automatic updating of course but it still gives you the information).


This useful tip came from a Google search resulting in
http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=53336

Has Twitter killed RSS feeds yet? Possibly not, but not working awfully well

Edit: 12 June 2013
Just spotted that these feeds no longer work. No more Twitter RSS feeds at all, unless you know a way of reproducing them through coding cleverness and / or have access to a server.

There's a new service http://www.twitter-rss.com/ which works for people (not hashtags or anything else). See also http://siftlinks.com/ which does the same with tweets but only for those with links. Thanks to Mark Braggins who commented here http://brodiesnotes.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/twitter-has-killed-off-rss-feeds-thats.html

Edit: 17 Jan 2013
For nerdy folk with a server / web host and techy skills, have a look at this page where someone has outlined a method of creating their own RSS from Twitter output
http://blog.fogcat.co.uk/2013/01/17/creating-an-rss-feed-for-your-twitter-home-page/

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If you are using RSS feeds and have found that they've stopped working you'll need to make sure your feed URL is of the second type not the first, just swap my name for the screen name you want:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/jobrodie.rss <-- not working
https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=jobrodie <-- correct

There's a petition to see if we can persuade Twitter to have a bit of a rethink on this.

Many people use Twitter widgets to ping their tweets into their website but some people use RSS feeds from Twitter to send their tweets to a variety of places (including FriendFeed). Up until recently people could do this with just the direct output from Twitter (not the RSS) using IFTTT but a couple of weeks ago Twitter asked IFTTT to drop that functionality. They weren't being mean, although it seems a bit like it, but IFTTT were using Twitter's system in a way that Twitter had already asked people not to use.

So some of us who used this sort of thing figured that the RSS feeds would work as a workaround, until Twitter stops support for RSS (due to happen in March 2013).

Yesterday a few people noticed that their RSS feeds had stopped working. For example a friend noticed that their corporate tweets were no longer showing up on the company intranet, having previously imported the RSS feed from there. An account I'd set up on Twitter which reposted Twitter RSS content also stopped working and my own favorites (saved as Opera mail in the Opera browser) have stopped updating.

We (people commenting on Twitter) wondered if Twitter had killed RSS a bit earlier than intended. I'm checking through my list of RSS feed options but have crossed out the ones that have definitely stopped working, and have asked Twitter if they can supply alternatives. I googled Twitter RSS but used the mildly advanced tools to select only new information published in the last 24 hours and found this https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/11582 which suggests that the RSS feeds haven't actually been killed yet, although they seem a bit fragile.

All these show up as a readable web page if you paste the URL into the Opera browser (doesn't work in Chrome at all) and some other browsers. 'Working' means it shows up as a page, not necessarily that it's capable of sending a feed somewhere else.

Twitter's confirmed that these RSS feed URLs will work until March 2013 - they did work up until 12 June 2013 following a series of blackout tests where Twitter switched them off and on again, now off entirely. Alas.

• User: https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=jobrodie <-- working
• User: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=jobrodie <-- working
• User: http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?user_id=15209730 <-- working (that's my Twitter ID, you'll need to use your own)
• Mentions: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=@jobrodie <-- working
• Favourites: http://api.twitter.com/1/favorites.rss?screen_name=jobrodie <-- appears to be working when pasted into Opera as a URL but my automated reader (Opera mail) stopped recording them on 4 October so I've reset it
• Search: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=fluffy%20bunnies (%20 acts as 'space') <-- working
• Hashtag search: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23scicomm  (%23 acts as '#')
• List: there is no working RSS feed for lists - I tweeted with one of the Twitter API people and confirmed this.

Recap - this is a separate problem from IFTTT stopping Twitter triggers. When that stopped working we simply swapped our Twitter triggers for Twitter RSS triggers and everything carried on fine until yesterday - if the RSS feeds don't work at all then I'm afraid I don't know how to get around that yet.

If you have RSS feeds coming from somewhere else and going to Twitter that will continue to work fine, this is only about taking RSS data from Twitter and putting it somewhere else. Twitter doesn't like that.

Further reading
New Twitter API drops support for RSS, puts limits on third-party clients
Mashable.com (5 September 2012) 

A Directory of RSS Feeds of Popular Social Sites
Labnol.org (3 September 2012)

Case studies - examples of using RSS feeds from Twitter to send somewhere else

• I use the Opera browser to open my favorites feed as a web page at which point it asks me if I want to subscribe - I say yes and am able to save my faves using Opera Mail.
• Your story here :) 

 

Easy ways to see the tweets of someone who's blocked you on Twitter

Edit - 1 July 2016: This post is now out of date and superseded by this one from 15 June after Twitter updated its block function Twitter's new update - blocked people can still see your tweets, but it is harder.

Briefly, official Twitter apps are much better at stopping you from seeing the tweets of someone who has blocked you, or stopping them from seeing yours. But of course you / they can still log out (or use a private browser tab) and Echofon for iPhone and (I hear) Twicca for Android still let you / them see blocked tweets in search results. Incidentally the subject of the original post below, from whom I initially learned quite a lot about the way the block works on Twitter was fined £19,000 under the Cancer Act 1939 and now has a criminal conviction. Whoops.

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Original post

Errol Denton, who has had numerous Advertising Standards Authority adjudications upheld against claims made about his products and services (see below) has blocked me on Twitter for asking him not to tweet about curing cancer and other conditions. I don't think I was particularly rude about this, but sometimes people don't like it when other people point out that they're doing something wrong. A few other people also suggested he might want to ease up on that style of tweeting and he's blocked them too.

There are several easy ways of reading the tweets of someone who's blocked you, here are some suggestions.

1. Log out. Once logged out Twitter doesn't know you're you and will show you the person's tweets if you go to their profile. This is also the simplest strategy to find out if someone's blocked you: if you can't see when logged in but can see when logged out you're probably blocked.

An alternative is to view the profile in a different browser (saves logging out!) or log into a different unblocked account. Errol's tweets are at http://twitter.com/ErrolDenton

2. Search for their name, either ErrolDenton or @ErrolDenton and you'll see most of the tweets easily.

The addresses in full (if you want to swap for the name of someone else who's blocked you):
ErrolDenton https://twitter.com/i/#!/search/realtime/erroldenton
@ErrolDenton https://twitter.com/i/#!/search/realtime/%40erroldenton 

3. View the RSS of the tweets - this will work until Twitter ends support for RSS on 5 March 2013 (Twitter announced this itself on its developers' blog).
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/erroldenton.rss Twitter's just killed off this old-style RSS feed URL
https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=erroldenton

The RSS means you can do other things though - you can capture them in an RSS reader (I've found the inbuilt "Opera mail" RSS reader in the Opera browser is brilliant for this) if you need to refer to them.

You can also set up an alternative Twitter account and 're-import' the RSS feed of the person's tweets into the newly created account with the IFTTT service (RSS trigger >> Twitter action). The chances are high that Twitter will shut down the fake account but it's an option to keep in reserve.

I could also add a new javascript / html widget to my blog and import his tweets into my blog, but I don't think I'll rush to do that!

Errol's simplest option is to make his account private - that solves the problem completely. He's presumably no longer breaking the law by making public claims about curing cancer. I (and the ASA etc) would no longer be able to see his tweets so wouldn't be able to complain about them.

The difficulty is that no-one else (unless they're following him) would be able to see his tweets which doesn't do much for his advertising. And of course it's possible that the people following him drop him in it either by manually retweeting one of his tweets or replying to them (and giving something away in their reply).

Twitter doesn't do 'blocks' very well. I actually think it's a big problem that they've just not solved very well and I'm not sure that they can solve it (short of making no tweet visible to anyone unless you're logged in to the system - this may well happen when they've killed off RSS, although that would be a bad idea for different reasons). Of course the alternative then would be to follow someone using a spare account.

Errol's adjudications were for:

• Claims made on a leaflet advertising his website and Harley Street services. I later discovered, from a Radio 4 investigation into his activities, that you can book Harley Street rooms by the hour.
• Claims made for a product called liquid chlorophyll, available via one of his websites (SeeMyCells.co.uk)
• Claims made by Groupon on behalf of Errol for a reduced price session of nutritional microscopy.
• Claims made on another of his websites (LiveBloodTest.com).

His company, Fitalifestyle, is now listed on the Advertising Standards Authority's website as a non-compliant advertiser - ie someone who persistently ignores their requests for information, evidence and who doesn't amend their adverts when asked. I understand that he has other ongoing investigations from Trading Standards but I don't know the progress of these.

Further reading
Josephine Jones' blog - she has reported on Errol several times and we 'met' each other by discovering through blog searches that we'd both put in complaints to the ASA. Here are her posts tagged with Errol Denton.

My more detailed blog post on What happens if you block someone on Twitter? What happens if they block you? - I wrote this in June 2012 and it's had nearly 18,000 views almost all from Google searches. My blog isn't really used to such interest, most of my posts only get 100 reads in their lifetime, but everyone seems to be terribly interested in blocking and evading blocks.

What's a hashtag?

Whenever you write something with http://www.xyz/ in it, or x.y@blah.com most computers recognise that this is a web address or an email address and turn them into an active link - clicking on them will open the web page or launch a new email message.

In Twitter, and in similar programmes, adding # in front of a word does two things. It turns the word into an active link (clicking on it from within Twitter or Twitter app will take you to the search page containing all instances of that hashtag) and it also collects up all instances of it that can be shown together (ie aggregates the tweets containing the hashtag).

This means that other aggregators, such as WTHashtag (What the Hashtag) or Twapperkeeper - examples below, can take the feed and present it on their page (ie syndicating the content on another page) - this is basically what RSS feeds do. RSS generally stands for 'really simple syndication'.

Examples
Twitter search, for #ADA2010 tag which corresponds to the American Diabetes Association conference tweets (note that # is expressed as %23) http://twitter.com/home#search?q=%23ada2010

wthashtag for ADA2010 (note that it picks up the #tag but removes the # from the URL)
http://wthashtag.com/Ada2010

Please help me make my FriendFeed room for 'Diabetes Twitterers' better

Shortened link for this post: http://is.gd/2CMKp

A while ago I dipped my toes into creating a FriendFeed room, really just a test of how to do so, in which I added myself and some other Twitter feeds to form a small collection of people who tweet about diabetes - I made it closed so that it wouldn't bother anyone. Then I forgot about it for a while.

Diabetes Twitterers
http://friendfeed.com/diabetestwitterers

Recently I logged on to FriendFeed to find 40 people had requested membership and since I opened up the room it now has 52 people, all of whom are very welcome.

However the room sucks (no offence to the people whose feeds I've used, including my own).

There are two problems that I can see, though more experienced FriendFeedsters might spot more.

One is that each tweet is divorced from its owner - there's nothing to say who said it, it seems as if all tweets in that room are being said by 'Diabetes Twitterers'. I'd like it at least to recognise (ideally with the right photo) who it is that's said the tweet.

Secondly, I have added myself (and others) who talk about diabetes. However I also talk about lots of other stuff and it's currently scraping every single Twitter utterance from my feed (which isn't unexpected but I wonder if it can be improved upon).

Having said that, there are five 't' icons for five twitter feeds and mine isn't among them so I'm not sure how I've managed to appear anyway...

Can I filter my own feed and those of others so that only the tweets we make that mention #diabetes will be picked up by that room? I don't mean just a #diabetes query search being threaded into the room, I do mean filtering my tweets, and those of others whom I've added.

I don't really want a #diabetes search feed in the room as I've seen the output of this on Tweetdeck and there's far too much blether about herbal remedies, raw food and alkaline water and my intention is to keep guff to the minimum ;)

So... can I fix either or both of these problems? How? Having played with the settings I don't think I can, but I'm not that expert yet with FF so all help gratefully received.

Thank you :)