Twitter badge without @replies January 13, 2009
Posted by Steve Boneham in : Twitter, HowTo, social media, RSS , trackbackI’m a recent convert to Twitter and was looking for a way to display my tweets elsewhere on the web - such as on the sidebar of this blog. However, I wasn’t happy with the standard Twitter badge, which mixes tweets on ‘What I’m doing’ with ‘@replies’ intended for individuals. Don’t get me wrong, I value @replies, I just didn’t want them on my badge. If you don’t either, here’s how to filter them out with Yahoo Pipes.
Shortcut: copy the pipe
If you don’t want to spend time building your own pipe, all you need to do is create an account, copy the pipe and point it at your twitterstream.
How it works
I used Pipes as it provides a simple way to manipulate RSS feeds. If you want to know more about how this works, read on.
In the Twitter RSS feed, each item is prefixed with your username. That’s useful when you’re mixed in with tweets from other Twitter users, but in a badge where all the tweets are from you, it’s a bit redundant. So we’ll strip that out too.If you ‘re familiar with pipes, then the screenshot below shows you what you’re after. The notes following this give more detailed instructions.
Creating the pipe
- Add pipe Sources > ‘Fetch Site Feed’
- Enter URL of your Twitter account
- Add pipe Operators > ‘Loop’ and connect this to the Fetch Site Feed pipe
- Add pipe String > ‘String Replace‘ within the Loop pipe (where it says Add module/pipe…)
- Set the ‘For Each’ to ‘item.title’
- Set ‘first’ to your twitter username followed by : (e.g. sboneham:)
- Set assign results to ‘item.title’
- Add pipe Operators > Filter and connect to the Loop pipe
- Set item.title ‘Matches regex’
- Set value to ^ @ (space between them is required)
- Connect Filter pipe to Pipe Output
You should now see a preview of your filtered twitterfeed at the bottom of the Pipes window. This should not contain any of your @replies and your username should have been removed too.
Using the pipe
You can now use this feed to create your Twitter badge as follows:
- Save your pipe and return to the My Pipes page
- Click ‘View Results’ to see your pipe output
- From the menu ‘More options’ select ‘Get as RSS’
- Use the URL of this feed to create your badge
Credits
This pipe is a simplified version of the Twitter Feed without Replies pipe created by Emil S
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Comments»
Sorry for posting a non-twitter related comment on this post, but you seem to have been able to integrate your yahoo pipes/twitter feed onto your blog nicely…
I’m a newbie to yahoo pipes - we have a design blog that we have been hosting on blogger for a few years now. We wanted to be able to create a feed of post summaries of the posts on our design blog, to post on our portfolio website. I was able to do this with yahoo pipes, but am wondering if there is a way to control the font type, size and color of the resulting feed? I am using the embed badge to put the feed onto our website. Any input you can offer would be greatly appreciated, as google searches aren’t helping much. Thank you!
It shoud just be a case of using a bit of CSS on your portfolio site to reformat the HTML created by the embed badge. Happy to have a look at it if you send me the address of the portfolio site.
Cool. I love Pipes as a tool, but I can’t use it myself. Thanks to people like you, I continue to customize my feeds in complete ignorance. Much obliged.
Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for allowing me to copy yours…saved me so much time!
Thank you, thank you, thank you!!
It’s great, except when I export the feed to my blog I get the title and entry (which are deplicates of each other) - do you know how I can fix this like your feed? Thanks (I’m a Pipes newb, sorry if I missed something obvious!)
Hi Katie - from your site I saw you tweet that you’d got your twitterfeed integrated on your blog. Does that mean you no longer need a answer to your question above?
Twitter RSS feeds have the same content in the <title> and <description>, which explains the duplication. My blog badge shows only the title, so that’s why you don’t see it here.
Hope that helps!
Hiya - yes, I used a different (simplified) script to get the feed without @replies in the end, thanks for your reply and the useful tool though!
very informative post
Just in case this is useful to anyone - I’ve written a short javascript function which can be edited into the standard Blogspot Twitter badge. It filters out @replies without needing a separate service like Yahoo Pipes.
You can see details here: http://t-swamp.blogspot.com/2009/06/filtering-replies-out-of-twitter-badge.html
For some weird reason, the pipe output does not show. It reads:
This Pipe ran successfully but encountered some problems:
warning could not parse feed from: http://twitter.com/arcticpenguin
This account, however, is active, so I don’t know what’s going on
The most useful post I’ve seen in this site. Thank you for sharing information
This is extremely useful, but should the original feed be the twitter page or the RSS feed it gives you, which is something like RSS_timeline37393939? I don’t really know how to use loops, but wouldn’t I need it to log into twitter to access my feed directly?
@grant. Pipes auto-discovers the RSS feed from the twitter page, so that’s what you should point this pipe to. You could do it via the RSS directly, but would need to amend the pipe a little.
Unless your updates are protected, both your twitter page and associated feed should be available without needing to login to twitter.
Great idea, but will this work over the long run?
I don’t usually reply to posts but I will in this case, great info…I will add a backlink and bookmark your site. Keep up the good work!
I’m Out!