RSS on Twitter

I've been looking for some time for a web application that allows me to aggregate news feeds and other things I find interesting into a single page that I may use as my browser start page. Some of these exist: iGoogle, BlogLines, and so forth, but they all lack certain features that I find to be absolutely critical to these sorts of services. I used the New York Times aggregator (My Times) for quite a while, and I really enjoyed it, but they decided to discontinue support for it at the end of last year.

After many disappointments in my pursuit of a new browser start page, I found an unlikely candidate: Twitter. On and off over the past couple weeks, I've been writing what ended up being a 500-line Perl script that retrieves RSS feeds, does some sanity checking on the posts contained therein based on age and whether the post has been processed previously, and then crafts a short summary of the article and tweets it, along with a TinyURL link back to the original post. I just finished the script a little while ago, and so far, it's working brilliantly.

The fruits of my labor may be viewed for a short while at the Twitter page for cwetherbee_rss. After some initial testing, I plan to make my RSS updates private, but if you're interested in following along, let me know, and I'll do whatever I need to do to let you follow the feed.

Now that the script is finished, all that's left is to copy the script and the data cache over to my server in Paris and set up a quick cron job there to keep the Twitter feed updated.