Using Twitter for More . . .

…more than the usual AIM-esque status updates, self promotion and such. I’ve been spending some time this afternoon (only an hour or so) setting up a very cool bit of technology that I see as a greater use of the resources that we already have.

The Background: Ithaca College has a section on the ithaca.edu site specifically dedicated to college news and announcements called Intercom. There’s an RSS feed (of course) and there’s some sort of CMS on the backend — though I can’t seem to pinpoint what it is without a little looking around — which is updated by various folks at random intervals.

What I wanted was a breaking-news style site, not a feed, that I could forward anywhere and that would be current (within a few minutes) with the site. Finally, I didn’t want this to cost anything or take any of my time (on a day-to-day basis) for setup or maintenance. Using a few different services (most of which I have already been using for other, various purposes) I was able to make this happen in under an hour.

Naturally, the Google helped me to find some tutorials that were of assistance. Though, I found, most of them were very specialized for things that I didn’t really want to do. Others were focused on setting up plug-ins for existing sites (I have no ownership of the site, no access to the CMS, and a high level of doubt as to whether or not they would install such a plug-in and support my geeky wants). That being the case, I was still able to get enough out of each of these independent sources as to figure out a solution that would work for me.

Services Used: Twitter (of course), TwitterFeed (and, as required OpenID), FeedBurner (not 100% necessary, but good for tracking), WordPress (with the FeedWordPress plug-in)

The Problem: I ran into an error when using the TwitterFeed service by itself. Initially, I was going to go the easy route and have TwitterFeed handle everything. However, for what ever reason, the feed coming from Intercom doesn’t have valid time/date information and, therefore, wouldn’t work to be pushed-out in a reasonable way.

The Solution: is probably much more complex than it needed to be. It works, though, and should provide some degree of expandability. What I did is, essentially, setup a WordPress weblog that mirrors Intercom (or any site, really, using the FeedWordPress plug-in) and (to fix the problem with time/date) keeps a local copy of the Title and Permalink back to the original Intercom story (the only two things I want in the Twitter updates). Of course, the output feed from this WordPress weblog (which is private, by the way) goes through FeedBurner, then TwitterFeed and gets the Title and Link in the Twitter status updates.

Pretty Slick, huh!?

As an aside, I’ve got lots to talk about here, just not enough time to write it all down and make it sound somewhat logical…I try anyway… Hopefully, my plan of carving out designated time slots will work and you’ll be hearing from me in less than a few months.