The beauty of RSS is that I can aggregate all of my information sources, read them at my leisure without worry of expiration, and organize them however I desire. It's always bugged me that I couldn't have that luxury with Twitter. Sure Twitter has RSS feeds, but they don't include the avatars, and they don't include direct messages, and they commonly truncate the tweets (blech). There are some pretty slick clients out there, sure, but why would I want to run yet another application for just another information feed? Why can't I have my cake and eat it too?
Last week, while I was up in Orlando for Acts As Conference, I did the same thing I do at most conferences, I started another damn pet project. Except this time I also completed it during the conference. Thanks to my bud Bryce Kerley from the Miami Ruby Meet-up for giving John Nunemaker's Twitter gem a little massaging, I had all the tools I needed to alleviate myself of the aforementioned headaches and get my Twitter goodness piped right into my RSS reader.
It's a proxy server, running on Rails (perhaps a bit overkill of a framework for such a simple application, but it's what I know best) that sucks up your Twitter business using their API and spits it back out in a consumable RSS feed, with avatars, and without truncation.
If you want to run it yourself, I've opened up the source over on GitHub at github.com/trak3r/twitter2rss
Or, if you're too lazy or don't have a cheap hosting provider, you can use mine over at twitter2rss.anachromystic.com
Enjoy!
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1 comment:
This is awesome. I've been meaning to do something like this for a while. Nice work!
Also, I hope you weren't working on this while Mr. Dan Benjamin was talking about distractions...
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