Introduction
I have used services before like TwitRSS.me to generate RSS feeds from Twitter user timelines. However, I recently noticed that the one feed I was using from this service did not seem to be updating. I took a look at the home page, and it appears that the service might not be working anymore due to changes at Twitter.com. Based on that, I decided I needed to look for another tool, and found two that appear to work well.
Granary
The first is Granary.io, which calls itself “the social web translator”. This site runs an app written in Python, and creates multiple feed types for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and several other social media sites/services. The home page features a set of buttons for a user to choose which service to work with. I clicked on the Twitter button, which then started an authentication with my Twitter account (I was logged in, so I did not have to take any action), then was replaced by a set of text boxed/drop-down menus:
I then changed the first drop-down menu from “@all” to “@self”, then changed the format dropdown from “as2” to “rss”. I pressed the “Go” button, which then generated a list of my last ten posts in RSS format. The app generated a link which I am adding to my feed reader. Next, I changed the “username” text box to another Twitter user handle “davewiner” (did not include the “@” symbol). Clicking on the “Go” button again gave a list of the last 10 tweets from davewiner. I did notice that the list was not in reverse-chronological order.
TweetsToRss
The second tool I reviewed was tweetsToRss by Dave Winer. This is a Node.js app which uses the node-twitter-api NPM package to get data from a Twitter user’s timeline. In order to use the app, the user needs to get an approved Twitter developer account to get a set of keys for this app. Fortunately, I had a set of keys from a previous Twitter app that I was able to reuse for this app.
I had Git, Node.js, and NPM already installed on a server, so I did a git command to download the app to my server:
git clone https://github.com/scripting/tweetsToRss
The app was copied into a folder (tweetsToRss). I then changed directories to that folder, then made some edits to the main app file tweetstorss.js:
- Added the four keys as specified on the app README.md page (decided to edit the parameters to specify the keys directly rather than set them up as environment variables.
- Set pathRssFile to “”
- Set twitterScreenName to “davewiner”
Next, I did a NPM command to install the required Node.js modules:
npm install
Finally, I went ahead and ran the app with the command:
node tweetstorss.js
The app started and appeared to run, but did not create a RSS file. After some experimenting, I figured out that pathRssFile needed to be set to undefined:
var pathRssFile = undefined;
With that last change, the app ran and created a RSS file with the 10 most recent tweets from davewiner (Dave Winer, creator of the app). The last change I made was to add a JSON file with a list of several Twitter usernames to create RSS files for each one (the README file links to an example that I modified). My final step with the app was to run it with the forever command:
forever start tweettorss.js
The app was now running continuously and calling the Twitter API once a minute to check the Twitter user timelines and update the RSS files. My last step was to reuse a script to FTP the feeds to a web server to be able to access them from my feed reader.
Viewing the feeds
To read the RSS files, I set up two single page apps using River5 and the RiverBrowser toolkit:
Conclusions
Pros:
- The Granary version shows more of the text from the tweets
- Able to use Granary API without having a server
- The TweetsToRss app better shows which of the Twitter user timelines are being shown
- The TweetsToRss app runs on my server, so I am not dependent on another service to get the Twitter data (like I was for TwitRSS.me)
Cons:
- TweetsToRss needs more setup that Granary
Both tools provide the desired result – the ability to follow Twitter users using a feed reader instead of a Twitter app or Twitter.com. Enjoy!