sinéad's lifestream

Inspired by a twitter conversation [1, 2] – here is a simple hack which can turn your twitter favorites into a Tumblr blog. Of course you could publish anywhere you wanted, but Tumblr is traditionally used to post links (rather than fresh content) and twitter favourites are often used to save interesting links posted by other tweeters (or ones you’ve posted yourself).

The first step is finding the rss feed address for your favorites.

This is always the following: http://twitter.com/favorites/[insert_your_ID_here].rss

As long as your tweets aren’t protected, you will be able to view this rss feed in any feed reader. You could even add a link to this in your blogroll if you didn’t want them published as individual blog posts. You could also add your friend’s favourites to your feed reader, thought it might spoil any upcoming links-posts they’re planning on publishing on their blog.

This is how mine: http://twitter.com/favorites/sineadcochrane.rss looks in Google Reader.

The second step is creating a Tumblr blog and then using the import rss feed feature. Once you’ve signed up, click on “Customise” and in the top left hand corner menu choose “Feeds” and add your favourites rss feed address. Doing this will mean you can automatically publish a new blog post every time you favorite a new tweet. Unfortunately it won’t import all of your old favorites, only the new ones.

For an example of all of this working, take a look at mine. It’s a small experiment you might like to be a part of…

A few weeks ago I had my first experience of running a Facebook Page, as we wanted to set one up for Culch.ie.

The primary goals of the Facebook Page were going to be the same as our Twitter account:

1. drive traffic to the site by informing followers/fans that a new blog post had been published,

2. tweet/update-status with exclusive competitions,

3. and interact with followers/fans with a little bit of fun and frolics.

These goals have been easily succeeded on Twitter, but the Facebook Page has been far more difficult and it has been a serious source of frustration for me. All of my Facebook Page energy has been spent trying to achieve the first goal. Something easily achieved on Twitter, thanks to Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed syncs our RSS feed with our Twitter account, so every time  one of our many authors updates the blog, the title and a link to the post  is tweeted. A significant amount of traffic for the site comes from Twitter (this is partially down to followers retweeting links) and we had hoped to achieve same on Facebook.

Facebook offers a number of applications for user profiles, but the majority of these will not work with Facebook Pages, including the Twitter application (and other popular apps like Tweetsync). Initially I discovered that the only solution to goal no.1 was to allow Facebook to import blog posts into their notes functionality, but by having your blog posts imported into Facebook your content is being copied into their walled garden, I’ve discussed before about the negative repercussions of this and have been reluctant to allow this to continue. It also gives rise to privacy and content rights concerns.

After trying and testing numerous Facebook applications I finally stumbled upon one that actually works with Facebook Pages, though it requires a less than direct approach.

The Selective Twitter Status application is designed to allow you to update your Facebook status, but only with a tweet ending/starting with the hashtag “#fb”. This proves quite useful when combined with the Twitterfeed option of adding a piece of text to every autotweet. For example you can set it so the text “New Blog Post…” appears at the beginning of each autotweet (so your followers know the link is to your own blog). However, by setting it to post “#fb” to each autotweet, Selective Twitter Status will then recognise the hashtag and push the tweet to your Facebook status. Also, so as to not pollute our main Twitter account with a hashtag meaningless to our followers, a seperate Twitter account was set up for this rss feed alone.

Now that goal no.1 has been succeeded with the Culch.ie Facebook Page there will be far more time/energy for goals 2 and 3, and I’m hoping the fan numbers will soon rival that of the Twitter account.

This is exactly the kind of problem solving I thrive on, so at least the frustration ended in a solution as well as few lesson about Facebook and Twitter along the way. I hope this is of some help to other frustrated Facebook Page users.

For the past month I’ve been using Google Reader on a daily basis. Not only have I discovered a wealth of information from the 100′s of blogs I’ve subscribed too, I’ve also discovered some wonderful functionality – some of which you can find on the sidebar of this blog.

Thanks to Elly I learned how to display an accurate selection of my currently subscribed to blogs. This is usually reserved for the WordPress links feature and came under the Blogroll heading. The difference being, my blogroll was never 100% up to date – it’s an easy thing to forget between posting new articles and tweaking the occasional feature or blog design. Today if I want to add a blog to my Blogroll I simply drag and drop it into the folders that I’ve created in Google Reader and it immediately appears on my own blog.

I went through a phase of using Digg, to social bookmark – to display a list of articles that I had read, that I found interesting and wanted to share. Google Reader has a similar feature built-in, though it doesn’t tell you how many other people have also marked an article as sharing-worthy, this might be something they will add once it has come out of beta. The last 5 articles I have marked interesting also now appear in the sidebar and the full list can be viewed here, you can even subscribe to this as it has it’s own RSS feed. If anyone else has one of these going, let me know. Sharing IS caring after all.

As I do most of my blog reading from work, I often don’t have the time to read everything, especially the longer articles. Obviously I’m not going to want to add it to my shared items if I haven’t read it, for this I can add a little star and view these starred articles on their own at a later date. This is especially practical if I find something related to my studies but don’t have the time to completely process the information. This is also great if someone posts a video or mp3 you want to watch/listen to when you’re in the comfort of your own computer.

My blog design is currently in transition seeing as I managed to KILL my previous theme template. I did far too much fiddiling with the code! It’s my own fault. So, I’ve reverted to the standard Kubrick WordPress theme. As soon as I am able to access the server my site is hosted on (having some issues!) I’ll be able to change it around and finally upgrade to the newest version of wordpress (I really need to do this! I’m getting far too much pharmaceutical related spam, it’s very weird).

Also – for anyone that is currently subscribed to my RSS feed I have recently setup a feedburner account, so please change your subscriptions to THIS new one – it’s a much nicer looking feed because of all the lovely options feedburner gives you, for instance, you can now see how many comments there are on each post.