Jeremiah Hoyet

Are you using Twitter? I am. I can’t say that I’m completely addicted, but it’s nice to see what people are up to at any given time in the day. There is a problem with Twitter, not many people understand it or know about it (in respects to everyday folks). That’s why this video rocks:

So last night I was decided to turn on “Device Updates” in my Twitter account preferences. Boy, was this a bad idea.

I was supposed to be getting an early morning call from my girlfriend before she went to a doctor’s appointment, so naturally I had a speed-metal ringtone with my ringer volume turned on all the way;  the cell phone sitting right next to my face as I slept like a drunk baby.

3am rolls around and my cell phone starts going nuts. I’m jolted awake by some hardcore music 3 times in a matter of minutes. Finally I open my phone to see who the hell was calling/texting me at this hour of the night and to my utter surprise. . . . someone is watching television at 3am in the morning. . . . .

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.