Jeremiah Hoyet

Recently I discussed my dismay with the way in which the Twitter RSS feed displayed on WordPress.com. I had attempted using a few free services to fix the issues I was having, and had little luck.

After a user commented that post, I decided to write a follow up. I admit, I wrote the previous post in haste and did not fully explore one of the free services that I had written about. That service was Dapper.net, which provides a very nice GUI, point-and-click interface to build mashups from existing feeds and any page on the web. I had, at first, thought feeds that I built using Dapper did not update as frequent as I would have liked, although they did update faster than Feed43. After some tweaking and playing around, I soon realized that my Dapper feeds were indeed updating about once every 15-20 minutes. I was even able to include the time and location from which I made my Tweet.

Dapper still has it’s issues though; for instance, I’m unsure of how you would go about building a “Dapp” that would capture multiple Tweets instead of just displaying your most recent Tweet. I’m also not sure how to get my Dapp feed to link to my Twitter account, instead the links just link to the page the feed is displayed on (in this case, my blog).

In all Dapper fulfilled my needs, so if you’re unhappy with the appearance of your Twitter feed on WordPress.com, I suggest giving Dapper.net a try.

Side Note: I’ll most likely be writing a guide on using Dapper to display your Twitter feed properly in the near future, so stay tuned.

Follow Up: Read about the solution I found here.

I’ve been trying to figure out a clean and simple way to display my latest Twitter Updates on my WordPress.com blog. The obvious, and most simple, solution to this problem is to just take my Twitter account’s RSS feed and add that feed to one of my RSS widgets. The only problem with this method is that the texted displayed always includes my Twitter account name before every Tweet, which in my opinion is not very sightly.

I’ve turned to a couple of free solutions to this problem, all of which have their ups and downs. My first attempt was using a website called Feed43 (Feed For Free). Feed43 actually works quite well, after you figure out how to section off the bit of the page you would actually like to have included in the RSS feed. The only problem with this service is that, even when paid for, the feed will only update every hour or so. I don’t know about you guys, but sometimes I Tweet 2-3 times in 30 minutes, meaning no one would see what I’m up to for hours, completely defeating the purpose of displaying the feed.

I then turned my attention to Dapper.net. Dapper is intended to be used for mashups, but from what I could tell, it’s an awesome tool to use when in need of a “custom” feed. Though I can extract the information I want from my Twitter page much easier with Dapper, I’m still having the problem of infrequent updates to the feed I’ve created.

Does anyone know a service that will edit or create feeds, won’t cost me money, and updates at least once every thirty minutes?