Nicole Bluto

So, recently I have been having problems with the Drupal Twitter module mostly because twitter stopped using basic auth and started using open auth.

What I want is a circle. I want to post to my website, and have my post automatically post to twitter and then show up on my webisite again if I want to show my recent tweets somewhere. This totally worked for me before they shut off basic auth. Now it's broken.

I have spent hours trying to make twitter module work again and it's not. So I began looking for a workaround. I thought to myself that Drupal is really good at outputting RSS feeds. You get one automatically on the home page and you can easily make a custom RSS feed of any custom view. So, then I thought, what if you could populate your Twitter account with an RSS feed. That would be perfect.

Enter Twitterfeed.com This service is free and offers not only to post to twitter from ANY rss feed, but also to post to facebook as well as other services. Your URLs are also shortened via bit.ly

This solves the problem. In Drupal all you need to do is create a view, if you have not already and add a display that is RSS. Then you can pull that view into Facebook and Twitter automatically.

I will give you an example of how this works for us. At Intrinsic Web Designs, we build websites mostly for Police Officer Associations. They want to provide useful content to the community. One of the feeds that we put on community pages is an Amber Alerts. Amber alerts come from a feed. We could use that feed and put it right into twitterfeed, but our goal is to bring people back to our sites. We use feed API module so that feeds that are brought into the site create first class nodes. Those nodes are pulled into a view. That view can have a feed of it's own. That feed can be put into twitterfeed and the link that is posted to twitter goes back to Our site, not the site the original feed comes from.

To accomplish the last goal of having our recent tweets displayed in a sidebar, you can easily create a twitter widget here: http://twitter.com/about/resources that pulls your recent tweets. You just create a new block and paste the code inside.

This solution is pretty easy and allows you to leverage twitter without even having to install any twitter modules. It makes updating your twitter and facebook statuses easy and automatic.

I'm sure there are multiple services that allow you to tweet and post to facebook from a feed. This is just the one I found today. If you have any good 3rd party services, post it to the comments and share!