HOW TO GET YOUR TWITTER RSS FEED FOR USE IN TABSITE.
A few weeks ago, Twitter redesigned its homepage, going from this design:
to this new design:
One of the biggest changes is that they removed all easy links to the the RSS feed of each Twitter user. Prior to the change, if you logged out of Twitter, any time you went to a users page the RSS image was visible in the lower right. Going back even further, the RSS feed for each Twitter user was always available whether logged in or not. However, this is all gone now!
According to Twitter, they have done this in favor of moving to the OAuth, an authentication method that lets you use applications without giving them your password. You can read more about the change here: http://blog.twitter.com/2010/08/twitter-applications-and-oauth.html
Because of this change, Twitter no longer directly supports RSS feeds, i.e. making them easily accessible.
This is important for TabSite users because if you wanted to import your Twitter feed to your fan page, you need to know the RSS link. The RSS feed hasn't gone away, it is just removed from easy access. So if you are using TabSite and need to get your Twitter user RSS feed so your Tweets can be added to your Fan Page, here are the steps:
1. Find your unique Twitter ID: Go to: ID From User: http://www.idfromuser.com/ and enter your Twitter Username. This will return an ID Number. Our TabSite Twitter ID is: 89696713
A standard Twitter user’s RSS feed looks like this; http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/XXX.rss
The XXX is an ID unique to each Twitter account.
2. To get your, or any Twitter user’s, RSS URL simply replace the XXX with their ID number.
So our TabSite Twitter RSS feed is: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/89696713.rss
Typically, this is all you need and this will let you import your Twitter RSS feed to other. However, if the RSS Validation fails you can go one step further and repurpose the feed into a broader RSS standard via Chimpfeedr by Mail Chimp.
3. To do this, go here: www.ChimpFeedr.com and enter your RSS feed with the ID as noted above. Paste in your RSS url from step 2 above and then select "Add Feed", then "Chomp! Chomp!" and finally enter a name for your "mix" (not really a mix since it is just one feed technically! :) ) and out will come a RSS url like this: http://mix.chimpfeedr.com/360d8-TabSite .
This RSS feed meets broad validation standards, including the TabSite validator for integrating a Twitter feed into your Facebook Fan Page, and viola, you're done! Your Twitter feed will now post to your tab / sub-page in TabSite.
NOTE: If you had your Twitter RSS setup previously in TabSite, no change is needed! This is for new Twitter setups in TabSite since the design change by Twitter.
Hope this little hack-around helps!
- Team TabSite
TabSite - The Easy Fan Page Tool!