Stuff that occurs to me

All of my 'how to' posts are tagged here. The most popular posts are about blocking and private accounts on Twitter, also the science communication jobs list. None of the science or medical information I might post to this blog should be taken as medical advice (I'm not medically trained).

Think of this blog as a sort of nursery for my half-baked ideas hence 'stuff that occurs to me'.

Contact: @JoBrodie Email: jo DOT brodie AT gmail DOT com

Science in London: The 2018/19 scientific society talks in London blog post

Sunday 30 September 2012

Handy Twitter RSS feeds to bypass IFTTT Twitter trigger switchoff


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

Below are examples of the RSS versions of Twitter feeds which should work as an IFTTT trigger. It's no longer possible to use Twitter feeds directly, but from what I hear the RSS version of the Twitter feed works fine

You don't have to use IFTTT if you just want to save a bunch of tweets though - @bitoclass subscribes to the RSS feed of his own tweets using the Opera browser to store them. I've tried this out for my own favourites (using the 'Opera mail' option) and it seems to work fine, and it doesn't delete them once you've read them.

Because the RSS feeds are also web addresses (URLs) you can open them straight into a browser although they behave differently, for example I couldn't get them to open in Chrome - it wanted to download an RSS reader.

Replace the username or search term(s) with your own.
  1. User: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/jobrodie.rss
    or https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=jobrodie
  2. Mentions: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=@jobrodie 
  3. Favourites: http://api.twitter.com/1/favorites.rss?screen_name=jobrodie
  4. Search: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=fluffy%20bunnies (%20 acts as 'space')
  5. Hashtag search: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23scicomm  (%23 acts as '#')
Twitter's actually switching off support for RSS feeds in March 2012 so this won't be a long-term solution. Hopefully someone will think of a fix before then!

There used to be an RSS feed icon on every page but Twitter removed those a year ago, however the RSS addresses (URLs) still worked, and versions of them work now.

Some example IFTTT recipes that can be customised, all use RSS feeds as the trigger
- note that I've not used or tested any of these

Further reading

Further posts in the Twitter tips series...

3 comments:

  1. Twitter killed off RSS feeds a few weeks back when it retired v1 of the API. I ended up writing my own set of scripts that filled this gap by providing RSS feeds. It is called Twools. You run it on your website and it gives you various RSS feeds of your Twitter data with powerful data. You can then use with a service like IFTTT.

    I've written more about it here, if you are interested.... http://iag.me/socialmedia/tools/introducing-twools-your-twitter-rss-feeds-unleashed/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, I shall add this info to my latest post to keep it all in one place http://brodiesnotes.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/twitter-has-killed-off-rss-feeds-thats.html

      Delete
    2. Sorry, only just seen your reply. Thanks for adding this to your article. Glad I am not the only one who missed RSS feeds from Twitter. Really glad we can get them back now!

      Ian

      Delete

Comment policy: I enthusiastically welcome corrections and I entertain polite disagreement ;) Because of the nature of this blog it attracts a LOT - 5 a day at the moment - of spam comments (I write about spam practices,misleading marketing and unevidenced quackery) and so I'm more likely to post a pasted version of your comment, removing any hyperlinks.

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