Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog (Archives)


Useful Tidbits and Egotistical Musings from Dan Wood


Fri, 05 Mar 2010

A better way to get Twitter feeds with NetNewsWire

Smart Twitter Feed

On Twitter, there are some tweeters that have such interesting tweets that I don't want to miss anything of theirs, so I subscribe to the RSS feed of their tweets.

What's always annoyed me is that, when I see the tweet in NetNewsWire and I want to go to the web page that their tweet links to, I can't just double-click on the news entry. I have to click on the short URL in their tweet, because the tweet links to the original tweet page. Not very useful.

This bugged me enough that I wrote a script that processes the tweets in a feed (from a particulur user, or a search) and re-links things a bit. And I'm sharing this with you.

Now you can subscribe to a twitter feed, and just double-click on the tweet itself to open any single linked URL in the tweet. (The script marks such tweets with ## and takes the URL out of the headline, since you don't really need to see the URL there.)

But there are other cool things it does. It recognizes yfrog.com URLs and embeds a thumbnail of the linked image. It filters out @replies from people in their tweet stream so you only have to see their original content, not their replies to people you don't know. It hyperlinks all #hashtag and @username mentions. It adds direct links for you to reply, retweet or view the original tweet's web page.

Go try it out at its home, http://www.karelia.com/stf/, where you can learn more details.

Just remember, this requires NetNewsWire, though I suppose it could be adapted to other PHP-script-compatible platforms.