MMMeeja

There’s more to Twitter than chat. Thanks to its API, loads of third party applications can interact with your information stream.

This article will show you how to use Twitter to alert you to new output from any web service that provides an RSS feed. I use it to check my hosting and page validity as I described in an earlier post.

If you are not already a Twitter user, I suggest you sign up and play around with it for a while as some of the steps involved in the article are a bit involved. If you’re already happy with Twitter and concepts like RSS, then let’s go...

Ingredients

For this howto, you will need:

• A Twitter account
• Mozilla Firefox
• A Google Reader account
• An Open ID. Don’t worry if you haven't got one of these, you can use a Yahoo account for this
• Accounts with some monitoring tools that provide RSS feeds

Step One - Mix All Your Feeds Together

Create a new category in Google Reader and add all of your monitoring feeds to it. If you are familiar with Google Reader, this should be old hat but if not:

1. Click the RSS icon
2. Select “Add To Google Reader”
3. When Google Reader displays the feed, use the “Feed Settings” pulldown to add it to a new folder

Repeat these steps for each feed you want to add.

Step Two - Make Your New Folder Public

The folder in Google reader provides its own RSS feed of all the items mixed together but it needs to be public before TwitterFeed can process it.

To do so, go to Google Reader’s settings and choose the tab marked “Tags”. Find your new folder and click the broadcast icon to make it public.

Finally, click the “view public page” link and locate and copy the URL of the feed for that category. We’re now finished with Google Reader.

Step Three - Create A New Twitter User

We want to create a new user for Twitter that will only ever tweet items from your feed. You’ll later follow the new user from your regular account.

Create your new user in the normal manner but there's no need to find any friends and you might want to make the new user’s feed private. Now, we need to get your regular Twitter username to follow your feed user.

1. Log into Twitter using your regular username
2. Point your browser at http://twitter.com/<feed-user-name> and request to follow
3. Log out of Twitter and back in again as your feed user. Accept the follow request
4. Log out of Twitter and back in again as your normal user

These steps can be simplified if you have two browsers (perhaps Firefox and Internet Explorer) and can use one for each username.

Step Four - Use TwitterFeed To Tweet Your Feed

Use your OpenID to get an account with TwitterFeed.

Use the username and password of your new Twitter user with the URL from your public Google Reader feed to configure TwitterFeed. It has got useful links by the fields to check your input, which are very useful. If an unspecified error occurred, check that your feed really is public.

Step Five - Serve With TwitterFox

TwitterFox is an excellent Firefox add-on for Twitter.

It sits discretely in the status bar and shows a short-lived popup whenever a new tweet comes in, much like GMail notifier. Any incoming alerts from your monitors will interrupt your browsing and you can attend to them right away.

Addendum

Whilst TwitterFeed can handle lots of different feeds for you, I use Google Reader to combine all the different feeds because I use it for all my other feeds and its saves TwitterFeed a little bit of bandwidth.

It’s a good idea to get TwitterFeed to preface each entry with a distinctive marker, like [EMERGENCY] so its tweets stand out.

What feeds do you use with this method? Have you found any great tools that have RSS feeds? Leave a comment and let me know.