Automatic posting of Tweets to WordPress via Yahoo pipes and XMLRPC

Photo via seemoo

I’ve been looking for a simple way to keep track of the interesting links I see every week, and was searching for a way to integrate it seamlessly with how I already browse the web. One of the major points I took from Matthew Ogle’s talk at FOWA Dublin was that in order to provide a service that’s really useful to the user it has to coexist with how they already use technology. So basically I don’t want to have to store the links somewhere special, and don’t want to have to add additional tags in delicious (I’d link to John Keyes‘ nice implementation, only his blog doesn’t seem to have “previous post” navigation buttons anywhere…).

Simultaneously, I wanted a little project to play about with yahoo pipes* somehow.

Shamelessly grabbing the “post to wordpress” function from this blog post on how to post to wordpress using python and XMLRPC, I’m filtering my tweets from the last week for any retweets that contain links and bundling them into a post. At the moment I’m leaving them as drafts to be published manually while I iron out any unforeseen bugs, and future implementations might include a nicer template or to add an automated flickr image for every post.

* Admittedly, pipes aren’t a necessary component in this setup as all. All the pipe is doing is taking my twitter stream, and plucking out any that have links in them and start with “RT @”. Optimisation sometimes makes for less interesting implementation, I just wanted to tinker.

2 thoughts on “Automatic posting of Tweets to WordPress via Yahoo pipes and XMLRPC

  1. Can I ask how you got the pipe to ping your blog each time it was updated?

    DC: It’s using a pull model rather than push. I have a cron job which pings the pipe once a week. A much nicer way might use webhooks or similar.

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