During all the talk about RSS being removed from twitter and facebook (now back), I realized that the same code could be retooled for use by others. So after toying around with it a bit and having some random people test it out, like @sarahintampa, it’s finally ready for more people to try.

Here’s a sample of how the output that the code will display in Google Reader.

I was thinking of making it a service but I have no idea how to get past twitter’s api limit of 150 calls per hour from a single ip address. If anyone knows how please let me know and I’ll see what I can do about get this out so you don’t have to host your own.

I put it up as a gist if you want to give it a try.
Twitter API 2 RSS

I have the .htaccess rewrite and code setup to be run from a /twitter directory off your root. There are three modes that it currently handles.
1) /twitter/username – this generates a feed of a named users statuses.
2) /twitter/username/favorites – this generates a feed of a named users favorites.
3) /twitter/username/listname – this generates a feed from a names users twitter list

There are also a few points of configuration.
1) $only_links – set it to 1 if you want only tweets that have links in them.
2) $title2tweet – by default the first link in the tweet gets used as the rss link. set it to 0 to link to the tweet instead.
3) $proxy – some hosts require proxy’s for outbound
4) $tag_case – lets you modify the hashtags as they show up as rss categories.

Couple future enhancements
1) new config to allow you to filter out retweets
2) pass through of additional twitter api querystring options

If you’re interested this is a screenshot of my current RSS Reader pet project. You can see tweets from @elijahmanor

shown in tag mode

I’m not a javascript guru but I managed to hack together something functional. We don’t go live until mid-may so i thought I’d put this out and see if anyone had any comments on the code.

window.Globalizr = (function(window,document,undefined){
   docElement = document.documentElement;
   classes = [];
   lang = '';
   var version = '0.1';
   ret = {};
   var d = document.domain.split('.');
   var l = d.length-1;
   var s = 0;
   classes.push(d[l]);
   var language = window.navigator.userLanguage || window.navigator.language;
   classes.push(language);
   if ('in,id,il,uk,nz,jp,kr,ck'.indexOf(d[l])>0) { s = -1; classes.push(d[l-1]); }
   if ((l+s) > 1) { classes.push(d[d.length-2+s]); }
   if ((l+s) > 1) { classes.push(d[d.length-3+s]); }
      else { classes.push('no-host'); }
   if (document.defaultCharset!=undefined) { classes.push(document.defaultCharset); }
      else { classes.push('no-defaultcharset'); }
   if (document.charset!=undefined) { classes.push(document.charset); }
      else { classes.push('no-charset'); }
   if (document.inputEncoding!=undefined) { classes.push(document.inputEncoding); }
      else { classes.push('no-inputencoding'); }
   docElement.className += classes.join(' ');
   return ret;
})(this,this.document);

Right now I have this code sitting right under the minified Modernizr code.

The goal of this code is to provide a starting point for innovation in feed readers. My hope is to have and support a robust toolkit that will provide a developer with data collection and a set of api’s to interface with the database. I want to work out a module structure in the long run so that options like getting data from postrank or tweetmeme will be possible. I’ve got alot of plans just need to get them into some form of roadmap to help me focus, plus a little feedback wouldn’t hurt.

Here’s a video I made of my RSS Reader front end using the above mentioned code. I’m not releasing the front end yet but soon I hope it will be just one option of many.

My only real issue was about feeds having to be active and pinging hubs. After reading a discussion that hubs could be designed to do a manual fetch of the feed and that it wouldn’t be against protocol. You couldn’t take advantage of the real-time aspects but your not shut out.

So I spent some time looking over the spec but I never learn anything without playing around. So on the last day of my vacation I managed to eek out some time and start playing. First thing was to build an end point and have it email me the request as I manually subscribed to the hub at http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com. Next day I got the end point to respond with the right challenge phrase, and now subscriber pings were flowing.

I sat on that for a bit trying to get a feel for the pings and subscribed to a few more feeds. I think it was at this time I realized the greatest thing about pubsubhubbub, I didn’t have to build a feed engine, just a catchers mitt. Sure for what I had in mind I’d have to slice up the <item> pretty deep, but I don’t have to manage a threading model to efficiently consume feeds. Yippeeee! Awesome.

So now I have an end point that does about 75% of the <item> parsing that I want to do and 7 feeds with two of them being google shared feeds.

You can take a look at a quick little reader I built at http://http://punchingsoup.com/#pubsubhubbub_panel. It’s ugly and doesn’t work quite right but it’s good enough to show.

Userscripts.org

Unfortunately I didn’t have time to build in a way to store search topics in cookies, maybe next version.

I was surprised at the lack of search operators. I expected to be able to search just the title or return only unread posts.

Here’s how to modify the script to add your own search topics.
Open the script up and all you’ll need to modify is this section.

var smarttopics = new Array;
smarttopics = {
"Buzz" : "leak|deadpool|acquisition|rumor|layoff|merger",
"Apple" : "apple|iphone",
"Microsoft" : "microsoft|windows"
};

Say you want to add a topic called Sun and it searches for Sun and Java. Add the following line above the “Apple”… line.

“Sun” : “sun|java”,

Removing a topic is just deleting the line with that topic on it. The biggest thing you’ll need to watch is the comma’s, make sure each line except the last has a comma after it.

It’s still pretty much a toy project and my first in python, but it is being used on http://punchingsoup.com and run every hour.

rss2db.zip

The setup is pretty simple.
1. Run rss2db.sql on your mysql server.
2. Modify the connection information to that mysql server in rss2db.py.
3. Run rss2db.py.

From here i’ll start building out a php based web frontend for the database that mimics what i’ve built in .net for myself.

Should be fun.

I’ve annotated the screenshots on Flickr. You can view those here RSS Reader Set

Get it here, friendfeed_on_twitter.user.js

Here’s just the search bar script, twitter_search.user.js

I also found out that Friendfeed updated their api with a way to query for a url. So i built a greasemonkey script to add a link to friendfeed on every url. I couldn’t figure out how to put the icon after the link and javascript isn’t something I’m an expert at. So far the url search only works via the api and not on the search part of Friendfeed, so the icon opens a window with the xml output of the api call. I fix this when you can search for a url on the main Friendfeed interface.

Get it here, friendfeed_link_on_twitt.user.js

Be kind these are the first greasemonkey scripts I’ve made.