How to get a Twitter feed in Google Reader Friday, January 09, 2009

Image representing Google Reader as depicted i...Image via CrunchBaseIf you happen to use Google Reader and have ever tried to add your twitter feed you'll know that they are incompatible. This is apparently because Google Reader doesn't support the authentication Twitter requires.

After wasting some time trying to use Yahoo Pipes as a conduit which was one solution thrown up on a web search, I finally thought I would try Feedburner which is the service that provides a RSS feed of this blog.

It was surprisingly easy and worked first time. Here's how.
  1. At the bottom of your Twitter home page on the left hand side, you'll see a box marked "RSS". Copy the associated link location by right clicking on the box and selecting to copy link location.
  2. Setup/Login into your Feedburner account
  3. Within Feedburner, go to "My Feeds", which is accessed at the top of the screen, and paste the Twitter link you copied into the field under the heading "Burn a feed right this instant".
  4. The link you copied in is password protected and so you now need to add your twitter username and password into the link as follows
    http://username:password@twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/nnnnnnn.rss

    where "n" at the suffix represents the numbers of your unique feed.
  5. Click the "Next" button adjacent to the Feedburner field you've entered the link into
  6. On the subsequent Feedburner page you can modify the resultant feed title and link if you wish to
  7. Click on the button marked "Activate Link". This makes your feed live and provides you with a feed url which you should copy.
  8. Back in Google Reader, add a subscription and paste in the feed url.
And that's it.

Given that Twitter no longer provides a feed via IM clients, you may find this an easy way to keep on top of your Twitter updates.
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Labels: , , ,

posted by John Wilson @ 12:49 PM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit



RSS service Newsalloy on the brink of closure Friday, May 02, 2008

Google ReaderImage via WikipediaWow, the May spring clean must be in full swing as I've just received an email from Newsalloy advising that it too is to close.

You received this email because you are registered user of News Alloy Project - Web2.0 based Feed Reader. (http://www.newsalloy.com/)

Bad times finally came, my contract with our hosting provider is over so i will shut down the site in a couple of days, please grab your OPML for your convenience.

Future plans:

If you are interested for project to stay alive and get it under your wing please contact me, we need new dedicated hosting (quite powerful).

 In case you want to get full ownership of the domain and grab all sources feel free to ask. It will cost not that much as fat cats are asking.

Also i've developed new version about 6 months ago which is half ready - News Alloy 2.0.
It looks much brighter, faster, pure Javascript UI, rich featured and impressive look and feel.

But to make it complete i need funding. Thats for sure.
If You want to have look - please let me know to get an invitation.

If noone is interested i will put other project on the top of News Alloy domain.

Please keep in mind that News Alloy project was developed by one single person who was in charge of everything - coding, design, promo and PR.

Now I'm open for interesting contracts and custom jobs in the area of web development and system administration.


Thank you for staying with us,
Volodymyr Danylyuk,
Project Developer and Maintainer

http://www.lordtime.com/
http://www.newsalloy.com/
Skype: v_danylyuk
E-mail: lt@lordtime.com


I'm sad to see this service close as it was the first online RSS reader I used and found it far superior to many others. Unfortunately, its' occasional outages prompted me to move to Google Reader, and from the site stats it looks like many others deserted the service. It never gained traction against more established services and was possibly doomed once Google introduced their reader.

Service Stats at 2 May 2008
Users online:10
Users registered:10977
Users active:280
Feeds subscribed:7160


Labels: , ,

posted by John Wilson @ 10:07 AM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit



InfoNgen - Financial news discovery Thursday, March 27, 2008

Over the last two years I've come across a handful of online services/applications that have sought to scour the web and discover articles/blog posts related to brands and companies. At first glance, Google Alerts provides a similar sort of function, but these offerings have sought to enhance their value in several ways
This news discovery/monitoring/detection capability, with output filtered for relevance to the user, addresses a blind-side that many companies had which entailed reliance on only a few trusted sources of mainstream media.

Most of the entrants into this field have targeted their offering towards financial services users, appreciating that this community attaches a high value to fast and reliable information discovery. As such, the potential revenue returns are high and the target market well defined for their sales efforts. I've previously commented on some of them - Market Clusters, Relegence and Monitor110.

At the simpler end, some of these appear to be glorified RSS readers but where content is filtered by keyword relevance. Some of these tools also provide stats on numbers of mentions, broken down by source type i.e. blog, online newspaper, company annoucement and may toss in trend information akin to Google Reader trends.

At the higher end, several of these have attempted to infer positive/negative sentiment in the sources, which is incredibly difficult to do but natural language technological advances supposedly enable good approximations to sentiment to be drawn from the text. As such, by aggregating the "information" about whether there is a positive/negative sentiment trend, perhaps weighted by the importance of the source e.g. my blog scoring a low weight and the Financial Times scoring a high weight, it is hoped to detect changes in market attitude.

Another one I recently came across is InfoNgen, which I would classify as being at the simpler end of the spectrum, but useful nonetheless, particularly for firms dipping their toe-in-the-water. Unusually they have a free version alongside their premium editions, but which gives you a flavour of its usefulness. Worth inspecting.

Labels: , , , , ,

posted by John Wilson @ 8:27 AM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit



AideRSS - not aiding my RSS reading Monday, October 01, 2007

Hmmmm. I so wanted AideRSS to work well for me and it looked promising so perhaps I've failed to configure it correctly but using the generated personalised feed it provides within Google Reader and
- the posts served up don't tell me who the author is, without looking at the links
- there's no mechanism to report which feeds/posts you like and dislike from within the RSS reader
- feeds that would appear in full are only providing headings in some instances
- within AideRSS site itself, I only seem to be able to rank feeds, rather than provide feedback on the posts

Am I missing something here? Welcome any guidance or suggestions

Labels: , ,

posted by John Wilson @ 9:01 AM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit



Hurrah - Google Reader is working again Monday, March 19, 2007

I mentioned that my Google Reader seemed broken on firefox, albeit the conditions were very specific.

Well two good pieces of news

1. My Google Reader is working again.

I found the "guilty party" - it seemed to be an add-in called Webcards.

My method was to disable all Firefox add-ins and then restart Firefox. Google Reader started working again. I then enabled the add-ins back one-by-one with restarts of Firefox each time. I left had left Webcards till last for some sub-conscious reason.

Google Reader worked fine right up until Webcards was enabled, then stopped. I disabled Webcards, restarted and Google Reader resumed working.

This would also explain why only a few people had experienced the issue with Google Reader including Sam Sethi, who I know has used the Webcards add-in in the recent past and may still be.

Meantime, if Andy Mitchell of Webcards is reading, perhaps you could have a look too.

2. Google Reader support is excellent

After posting about my problem on this blog, a Google Reader engineer got in touch via the comments within a few hours and exchanged suggestions about investigating the issue.
AND ON A SATURDAY. That is impressive.

Labels: ,

posted by John Wilson @ 11:45 PM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit



My Google reader is broken Saturday, March 17, 2007

No idea what's causing this but Google Reader is broken on my PC and has been since Monday. More specifically
- it's only broken on my laptop (Desktop is fine); AND
- when using Firefox (IE7 is fine); AND
- when using my main google account (still operates on a secondary account)

ie it still works on my laptop for my secondary account in Firefox but not for my main account; yet my main account still works on my laptop under IE7

Quite simply, I log in and the header appears, after which it gets stuck on the "Loading" image.

After checking Google Reader forums it appears I'm not alone, but it's evidently not the account or the browser or the laptop individually but only in combination. It's irritating because I've stopped using IE7, having converted to Firefox initially for it's recovery feature. So now I'm having to use two browsers.

Any ideas how to fix it?

Labels: ,

posted by John Wilson @ 4:15 PM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit