Down the Rabbit Hole

I read my own blog post last night and decided to try to get a solution to the aggregated blogging of tweets.  It turned out to be a little bit of a rabbit hole.  I started out looking into new services that would have this functionality.  I found third party applications that publish tweets to blogs, but I couldn't find one (admittedly with not too much effort) that would do a daily digest.

I poked around inside IFTTT a little bit and came across a skill called "email digest" which does, can you believe it, exactly what I was looking for: it accumulates content and then emails it.  The summaries can be hourly or daily or weekly, so I could set up what I'd had before.  Blogger has a publish by email function.  Using IFTTT I could link Twitter to the Email Digest function and viola I would have daily aggregated twitter posts on the blog.

But David, you say, I am reading a post about going down a rabbit hole, not a series of republished tweets.  If you really did have the solution you would have implemented it, yes?  Or are you just lazy?

Well, I am extremely lazy - and I could blog about that - but that isn't what happened here.

If you've used IFTTT you might have an idea what happened.  When you link a process to your IFTTT you have to configure it with a singular setting.  I had previously set up the email digest function doing a couple of other things - I was getting email digests of the daily agenda of the US Congress - using one of my personal email addresses.  In order to use the publish by email I would have to reconfigure the skill from my personal email to the publish by email address.

I could live with that.  All of the email digest recipes I had configured I had also turned off.  Re-configuring the address would be doable.  That wasn't the sticky bit.  The sticky bit is on the Twitter end.

I have two Twitter accounts.  One of them is the home of my sarcastic curmudgeon.  The other account is the Twitter home of my News From the Real World blog.  Even though my personal twitter has really slowed down the @NFTRW_Feed Twitter is still plugging away.  It tweets at least 10 articles each day and many, many job listings.  All of that activity is passive, automated through an application called Buffer and an application called IFTTT.

To use IFTTT with my personal Twitter account I would have to delink it from the Greenpage account.  I wonder from time to time about the utility of the job postings, and I might be willing to let it go in order to get this blogging functionality back, but there was enough friction there to keep it from happening.

There are other paths to follow, but not being able to get at the Twitter content with Twitter makes it more complicated.  For a while Twitter ran RSS feeds for every Twitter feed.  In that case I could write a recipe that scraped an RSS and then published it through a daily digest email.

Ok, do that, you're saying.

Well, I would, but Twitter stopped burning RSS feeds for all their feeds.  And not only that, but they've significantly complicated the process for third parties to generate the RSS feed themselves.  Upon further consideration I think something in this area might be a big part of why LoudTwitter disappeared in the first place.  I did find one service that would construct a custom RSS from a Twitter feed, but it was a pay service and the free level only included five entries per day.  I guess on most days five or less would be swell but there would likely be many days where that would wind up being truncated.  I might do it that way, but I'm not ready to compromise yet.

So there's that.