Mar 24 2016 0

Automatic post to Twitter

Blot.im does not have a feature to automatically posting a notification of a new blog post to for instance Twitter. And based on the following tweet from David, it is not something that will be (ever) added to Blot.im

https://twitter.com/lllIIlIlIl/status/712717710027718656

But David also noted you can easily set this up using your blog’s RSS-feed, using services like IFTTT or twitterfeed.com

https://twitter.com/lllIIlIlIl/status/712717837215748097

I have been thinking for quit some time about automatically post every new blog post onto Twitter, but not all post are something everyone needs to be notified of. With the standard RSS-feed it is an all-or-nothing-approach. This is a job for the custom metadata feature of Blot.im

Added special RSS-feed for posting to Twitter

In your design add a new view, in my case I named it tweetfeed.xml (.xml to ensure the proper content-type is used). As URL I specified /tweetfeed.rss.

Tweetfeed Settings

The following code is used as the template code (basically the same code as feed.rss, but with custom metadata added and the description field removed);

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
  <title>{{title}}</title>
  <link>{{blogURL}}</link>
  <description>The feed of updates to {{name}}'s blog.</description>
  <updated>{{updated}}</updated>
  <id>{{blogURL}}</id>
  <author>
  <name>{{name}}</name>
  </author>
  {{#recentEntries}}
    {{#metadata.twitter}}
      <item>
        <title>{{title}}</title>
        <link>{{blogURL}}{{url}}</link>
        <guid>{{blogURL}}/{{id}}</guid>
        <pubDate>{{dateUTC}}</pubDate>
      </item>
    {{/metadata.twitter}}
  {{/recentEntries}}
</channel>
</rss>

By using the {{#metadata.twitter}} only posts that have the metadata tag ‘Twitter: Yes’ (The value Yes has no actual meaning, it could be anything) will be included within this RSS-feed. For this post the heading is as follows

Date: 2016-03-28
Permalink: automatic-post-to-twitter
Tags: Blot, Twitter, IFTTT
Twitter: Yes

Which results in the following RSS feed to be generated 1

<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Shared Memory Dump</title>
<link>http://sharedmemorydump.net</link>
<description>The feed of updates to 's blog.</description>
<updated>Thu, 24 Mar 2016 16:15:00 GMT</updated>
<id>http://sharedmemorydump.net</id>
<author>
<name/>
</author>
<item>
<title>Automatic post to Twitter</title>
<link>
http://sharedmemorydump.net/automatic-post-to-twitter-using-ifttt
</link>
<guid>http://sharedmemorydump.net/194</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 24 Mar 2016 16:15:00 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

and the following tweet

https://twitter.com/drexore/status/713036435289411585