New Twitter RSS Feed – Twit2RSS
I’m trying to consolidate my communications channels. Since I recently started using Twitter, I became frustrated by it’s limited RSS capabilities. While some of the Twitter readers are pretty cool, they are just one more thing that I have to have open on my desktop. I’m already using a ‘great’ (GreatNews) RSS reader, and I wanted to read my Twitter feed there too.
Issues with the Twitter RSS feed:
- The Twitter RSS feed is very basic. It lacks some of the nice features, like user images and active hyperlinks.
- I found that the Twitter RSS feed was severely latent. For me, updates were only appearing every eight hours or so.
I wrote a PHP script called Twit2RSS to improve upon my Twitter experience. With Twit2RSS, in most respects, the Twitter posts will appear in your feed reader just as they do on the Twitter website. Additionally, I added a few useful links so that you can easily reply to someone, send a direct message, or just type an update.
There is also a very cool feature that allows you to categorize your friends in your feed. I may expand on this later, but right now all you have to do is type in your friend’s screen name and the category which you create. Every Tweet from that friend will include the category. Depending on your feed reader you could filter different circles of friends using the category. It might also be helpful if you can’t quite remember why you’re following a person. One of my suggested categories is ‘competitor!’ As an example, you could filter out a lot of Tweets by tracking only your ‘BFFs’.
The script is available for immediate download. It’s being posted AS-IS. Use it at your own risk, blah, blah, don’t sue me, blah, blah.
If you like it, feel free to buy me a beer via PayPal at swhitley@whitleymedia.com.
If you don’t like it, buy me some programming lessons at swhitley@whitleymedia.com.
Download:
http://code.google.com/p/twit2rss/downloads/list
Mike said,
Wrote on November 17, 2007 @ 8:30 am
Google Reader says there is no feed available at my url.
I get this error when I run twit2rss.php in FF browser:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ in /home/mlorim/public_html/feed/twit2rss.php on line 252
I rechecked my twitter username and it is correctly inserted on line 252 >public $username=’xxxx’
Am I overlooking something?
Shannon Whitley said,
Wrote on November 17, 2007 @ 11:31 am
Hi Mike,
The line should end with a semi-colon:
line 252 >public $username=’xxxx’
Must be –
public $username=’xxxx’;
However, I realized that the instructions need to be modified. You shouldn’t be changing line 252 at all. You only need to change the username/password at the top of the script.
Mike said,
Wrote on November 17, 2007 @ 2:40 pm
Never mind. My host’s php is version 4.4.4
I’ll try to upgrade it to v5.
Thanks.
Mike said,
Wrote on November 17, 2007 @ 2:52 pm
That did the trick: php v5, edit line 44&45 only.
Reader works great. Thank you!
Shannon Whitlehy said,
Wrote on November 17, 2007 @ 3:46 pm
Great news. You’re welcome. Let me know if you have any suggestions for improvements.
alice said,
Wrote on February 15, 2008 @ 11:17 pm
When I download version 1.5 and unzip the archive, I get the following error:
I tried the first version, but I can’t get a reader to load it and when I click it, I get an error on line 58.
Shannon Whitley said,
Wrote on February 18, 2008 @ 11:57 pm
I tried to correct the download, but Google was throwing some errors. I’ll give it a try again. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Shannon Whitley said,
Wrote on February 20, 2008 @ 5:13 pm
Download is back up and working.
A Great List Of Twitter Applications — Largest Social Networking Blog said,
Wrote on February 23, 2008 @ 3:53 am
[...] Twit2RSS – Read and reply to Twitter posts from your RSS reader. With this enhanced RSS feed, you may not need a separate Twitter reader. [...]
jeff said,
Wrote on July 23, 2008 @ 7:10 am
really dumb question: where do i put this file once i have unzipped it and made my changes? thanks, i look forward to using this.
swhitley said,
Wrote on July 27, 2008 @ 1:36 pm
@jeff
{blog root}/wp-content/plugins/
Jeff said,
Wrote on July 27, 2008 @ 6:31 pm
i promise i will buy you a beer when i get this working! i copied the file where you said and tried to activate the plugin using the wordpress admin tool. i get the following error message:
Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ in E:\USERS\bp411co\www\wp\wp-content\plugins\twit2rss.php on line 474
line 474 is in the curl section where it asks for the username. i did not fill in my username as the script directed.
any help is greatly appreciated.
Jeff
Shannon Whitley said,
Wrote on July 28, 2008 @ 9:39 am
I think the script has placeholders for your username and password {username} – Make sure you remove the braces. They are just there to indicate that they are placeholders. Make sure your username and password have quotes around them.
jeff said,
Wrote on July 29, 2008 @ 11:04 am
turned out to be a php version 5 issue. then php memory needed to be upgraded to 32M from 8M to accomodate wordpress. the script is working great now. thank you for the help.
Tom said,
Wrote on August 10, 2008 @ 1:33 pm
I too have been frustrated with the limited (not to mention temperamental) nature of the twitter RSS. I’m looking forward to using this plugin, but when I run the url, I am greeted with the following error:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function curl_init() in C:\xampp\htdocs\wordpress\wp-content\plugins\twit2rss.php on line 482
I suspect this is something to do with my cURL installation but, not being very technically inclined, I’m not sure where to start looking for the problem.
Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated.
links for 2008-12-18 « dupola’s weblog (en) said,
Wrote on December 18, 2008 @ 9:01 am
[...] New Twitter RSS Feed – Twit2RSS | Shannon Whitley (tags: twitter twittertools twitterideas) [...]
mesmoquesejaeu (mesmoquesejaeu) said,
Wrote on January 29, 2009 @ 2:14 am
Twitter Comment
New Twitter RSS Feed – Twit2RSS | Shannon Whitley [link to post]
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150 Useful Twitter Tools and Applications | Voooz.com said,
Wrote on August 31, 2009 @ 10:43 pm
[...] Twit2RSS – Read and reply to Twitter posts from your RSS reader. With this enhanced RSS feed, you may not need a separate Twitter reader. [...]
Bullish China » 999 Twitter apps and services–the ultimate tiwtter resource said,
Wrote on September 9, 2009 @ 12:50 am
[...] Twit2RSS – Read Twitter in your RSS reader. [...]