I spent some time yesterday afternoon working my way through an article on SEO-ing Twitter profile pages. Â Whilst I don’t agree with absolutely every point in the article (e.g. tinyurl.com is too many letters for a URL shortener – I like to use bit.ly with a custom domain), it does contains some good advice (who would have thought of naming their Twitter profile picture to include appropriate keywords?). One point that doesn’t work though, is feeding your Twitter RSS feed to Feedburner.
There is a workaround though. Following Michael Phipps’ advice, I created a page called twitterfeed.php with the following code:
I then fed the URL for this page into Feedburner. I’d prefer to use an address on my own domain though – and it’s simple enough to create an HTML page to redirect to the correct location (and to add information for browsers to recognise the RSS location):
Redirecting to the @MarkWilsonIT Twitter RSS feed. If you’re not redirected within a couple of seconds,
try this link: @MarkWilsonIT on Twitter
The downside of this is that Outlook doesn’t like an RSS feed that’s redirected from HTML. Google Reader seems happy with the redirection although, because it does actually resolve to the Feedburner address, it won’t help me should I move the feed elsewhere in future…
In the end, I’m not sure what this achieves, but you can now subscribe to my tweets via RSS…
Mark,
Seen as you appear to already be using PHP, why not do this:
<?php header(“Location: http://feeds.feedburner.com/markwilsonit-twitter“);
Personally, I use Yahoo Pipes to collate all my microblogging (Twitter and StatusNet) to appear in my blog.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=6ca6c73dd36fa796d90f94e36fcd3079
@Jon would that replace my second code sample then (the HTML bit for the redirect)?
I use a Yahoo Pipe for a Twitter feed without @replies that I pipe into the internal social network at work but have had varying levels of success and haven’t yet worked out if the issue is Pipes or Newsgator Social Sites…
@Mark, Sorry it took so long to reply – there’s no way to spot whether comments have been replied to… in fact, I only spotted this thanks to a Vanity Search on Google alerts!
Yes, that second code example would be replaced by that one line of PHP. Just to note, the < should have been a “less than” chevron, damn your HTML blocker ;)
With regards to the Newsgator Social Sites, I’ve struggled to do anything positive with the Newsgator system – I almost got to the point of reverse engineering the desktop client to make it do what I wanted it to… and then figured it wasn’t worth it – so I have a shortcut to the conversations page that I check every few days.
Thanks Jon. And yes, I should re-instate the comment notifier I removed a few years ago… and I have some conflicting plugins making it difficult to display PHP in comments… this site really needs a kick up the…
I’ll give your code a try (because, you’re right – much more elegant to have it all in PHP!). As for Newsgator… well, the less said the better: I’m not impressed…