Hacking Twitterfeed: iTunes > RSS

Twitterfeed is not perfect, but combining it with Yahoo Pipes gives you a lot more flexibility. Pipes allows you to manipulate RSS feeds without dealing with raw code, so you can mold one or more into a newly shaped feed.

Recently, I had this problem where I wanted to send a bunch of RSS feeds to publish automatically to Twitter. This was great in theory, until the podcast had to go up. The issue with the podcast was that the XML was written using iTunes tags. Here is what one item looks like:


<item>
<itunes:author> Ed O'Keefe / washingtonpost.com</itunes:author>
<itunes:subtitle>Plus: What Politics Can Do About Obesity</itunes:subtitle>
<itunes:summary>A recap of the day's political news, and analysis from The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com.</itunes:summary>
<enclosure url="http://cdn.washingtonpost.com/podcast/p3podcast052208.mp3" type="audio/mp3" />
<itunes:category text="Politics & News"></itunes:category>
<itunes:duration>17:25</itunes:duration>
<itunes:year>2008</itunes:year>
<itunes:keywords>Politics,politics,The Washington Post,washingtonpost.com,news, washington</itunes:keywords>
<guid>
http://cdn.washingtonpost.com/podcast/p3podcast052208.mp3
</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 22 May 2008 10:05:00 GMT</pubDate>
<title>Post Politics Podcast: David Broder on the 2008 Presidential Race</title>
</item>



Twitterfeed could translate all of it, except for the link. If you are reading this, I am guessing you are looking for an easy fix to this problem. The solution is not that hard to implement.

Before I get into an explanation of how I did this, take a look @ the end product, the P3: Post Politics Podcast pipe.

INSTRUCTIONS:
You need a yahoo account.
Go to the pipes page.
"Create a New Pipe"
From the left hand column -
Under "Source" drag a "Fetch Feed" into the main area.
Enter the URL of the offending iTunes feed.
From the left hand column -
Under "Operators" drag a "Rename" module into the main area.
From the drop down, select the iTune tags you want to rename and then enter the way you want to rename it.
Example: item.enclosure.url RENAME link
Note: you don't have to write item.link
Repeat for every item you want to ensure is transfered over
Then, connect the dots on the tops and bottoms of the pipes, save & run.

Here is the resulting twitter: P3: Post Politics Podcast.

That's it! Pretty simple hack!