Tag: twitter

Integration with Twitter – RSS to Twitterfeed.com

I have spent three days working on this. I have gone down many a fruitless avenue. You can post to Twitter from Drupal just like it says. But all you can do is post a specific piece of content, one at a time. That may be fine for many different circumstances. But what I have is a “News Ticker” of sorts on my main page. A scaled down version without links for anonymous viewers and a more involved one for authenticated users. and i want that  type of feed to be used in twitter. I want twitter to show the news items as they come in and are categorized by me.

So, i have worked with this. And in theory it should work:

Core Aggregator Mod –> Views –>

Sub View that has an RSS feed that goes to a page URL–>

Feed Importer from the Feed module that pulls from the URL of the RSS feed created by Feeds –>

Content Type that I created and configed in the Importer –>

That Content Type automatically posted to Twitter.

All of this works. the Aggregated items go into the View with the RSS feed which has a URL. My email client gets all of the RSS items, no prob. The importer uses that same RSS URL to pull the aggregated items in as Nodes attached to the content type that is specified in the Twitter config to be posted automatically. But they don’t post.

They are there, in the content, correct user name for publishing, all that. And all I have to do is edit that particular node and then save it and it will then post. BUT, not until then. I believe that the Twitter function is not called until you edit the node and then save it. So i tried to use the Views Bulk Operations module to do all sorts of things to those nodes including bulk saving the node, just like I do when I edit and save. But, it is the clicking of the edit node that calls the function. So, they would just not post automatically. And I am not going to build a site with a bunch of manual admin tasks.

So, I kept looking. And I found this article. And then I found Twitterfeed.com. This is precisely what I wanted. And, it is free. I am very happy. This had driven me nuts for three days. Don’t get me wrong; the twitter module works like it is supposed to. It just wasn’t what I needed. and this is.

Posting Aggregator Content to Twitter II

this is going to work. i actually made it work but missed the series of steps last night. but i will reproduce it today.

Here is what i need to do:

  • Have Twitter display my aggregated news (from RSS Feeds) items as they are classified by me using the Core Aggregator Module. I already have the Twitter integration mod installed and working. 

Here is the issue:

  • Aggregator Core doesn’t create nodes from these items, just simple db objects
  • The Feeds Module will create nodes from RSS items, but the classification isn’t nearly as easy as it is with Core and I have over 100 items per day to classify so I have to use Core

Here is what I am doing to work with existing code/mods.

  • Create a feed version (in Views) of the View for the News Feeds that shows News items from the last 24 hours. This View is the end result of the categorization that I do.
  • Now I have an RSS Feed for the View. I can go to my email client, put that URL in and get the News items that I catregorize as RSS items. And I have a nice little RSS Feed icon at the bottom on the nPanel that hold the View
  • Import that created rss feed into the Feeds module using a Feeds importer
  • The importer puts the items into a Content Type create for the Twitter integration. This part works from a manual process.  when I create content with that Content Type, it goes into Twitter

This all works like it should except that I am missing one thing somewhere. I have made it work once but then I changed something (it was late last night and I was half asleep) and missed what it was that I needed. But I will make this work again.

Twitter, Oauth and Search

Well, I believe that Twitter integration is the last big piece to be put into place before I start theming. I also want to try to have search simplified. Here is the problem:

Much of my data comes in from RSS feeds. These pieces of content are searchable through Views all day long but they are not indexed under the same engine as other content via the core search function. Now Feeds will pull RSS feeds in a way where each is a node and that would allow me to do that. But I don’t like what I saw from Feeds in terms of categorizing content from a bunch of rss items. and I have a lot of them around 100 a day at least. So I need to keep looking.

But the searches can be done in Views by exposing the Body field and the operator for the search. But it means having more than one way to search. and that is a pain.