Twitter badge without @replies January 13, 2009
Posted by Steve Boneham in : Twitter, HowTo, social media, RSS , 16commentsI’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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