Things made this weekend: Abbreviated Twitter Link feed

6 May 2013

Python  Web 

I'm currently working on a little RSS feeder app in my spare time (which may eventually get released to the outside world, but not yet), and along the way I've made a few other useful tools.

The first of these is currently sitting at http://abbreviated-twitter-feed.eu01.aws.af.cm/ on AppFog (which I'm quite enjoying incidentally) is a little app to take your current Twitter homeline feed, fish out tweets with links in them (skipping Foursquare and Instagram as they're not really interesting for this), expand them out from the shortened versions and then make an RSS feed of those. I'm essentially using RSS as a common container format to stuff into my feed reader, rather than trying to munge it into talking to Twitter.

There are other existing Twitter -> RSS feed services, but this one deliberately strips out the authors of the links, as I just wanted an ultra-minimalist "here's the text, here's the link" feed for the purposes of later reading of all the links that come in from Twitter, as opposed to browsing people's links on Twitter itself.

Source code is at https://github.com/palfrey/twitter-link-feed (it's a Django app as that was the fastest way to get a lot of functionality really quickly, rather than hacking together my own even more minimal framework). Enjoy!

Previously: Rapid-fire Fiasco-style pseudo-LARP... in a (fictional) car Next: Things made this weekend: Beeminder failure calendar

Comments

With an account on the Fediverse or Mastodon, you can respond to this post. Since Mastodon is decentralized, you can use your existing account hosted by another Mastodon server or compatible platform if you don't have an account on this one. Known non-private replies are displayed below.