Ask Owen

I’m a big Twitter fan with loads of followers and have just given Plurk a whirl. It looks great, but I’d like to send my Plurks to Twitter automatically. Can I do that?

There’s a bit of role reversal here, because I was the one to ask this question and Suni from Bucket O’ Bulletz was the one to answer it (ok, it was DrVictorine who told her how to do it). So, welcome to my first guest answer on AskOwen. You know it’s only a matter of time, drinking and drugs (though I’m not sure if hoodia falls into this category), before I needed to have my questions answered

Anyway, down to the matter at hand. How do we integrate Plurk and Twitter? The secret lies in RSS, that simple little protocol that is serving to glue so many websites together. You see, Plurk lets you export your Plurks as as RSS feed. You can see the hyperlink to this on your Plurk screen:

Copy this URL and head down to TwitterFeed. TwitterFeed is a little tool that lets you subscribe to an RSS feed and send updates to your Twitter account whenever there’s a new update. See where I’m going with this? You’ll need an OpenID to sign up with TwitterFeed but it’s quite easy to get one. Once you sign up, you’ll be shown a screen to set up your feed:

The options are quite straightforward and these are the things you need to fill in:

• Your Twitter credentials (you can test these are correct)
• Your Plurk RSS feed. We copied this earlier (you can test these too)
• Update Frequency. I set these to the smallest interval: 30 minutes
• Include: Set this to Titles only. If you use Titles and Description, you’ll just get the same thing repeated twice.
• Prefix each Tweet with: Set this to whatever you want. I set mine to Plurk, but I think I’ll remove it.
• Filter by keyword: I didn’t use this feature, but if you want a keyword to tell Twitterfeed which Plurks to send to Twitter and which not to, you could use this to tag your Plurks

Click Update and you’re done. Send a Plurk and wait for it to come out on Twitter.

If you’ve never tried Plurk, sign up here (you can follow me at that link too)

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