One of the more conversational topics on twitter is whether an account should be populated only by feeds. We’re not going to discuss those reasons here, but what we will do is show you one good use of using feeds to create a parent-child account relationship that brings additional content into your master account.

The use case — automatically insert a personal/child account into a business/master account. In our case, we’d like the parent account @theobserver to have automatic updates from the editor, @rthames.

The goal is to have a tweet from the parent account appear like the following, using a prefix to differentiate the update:

Via editor @rthames: With tax revenues down, the city will cut transportation jobs, trim bus service and freeze employees’ pay. www.charlotteobserver.com

Or, if you’re more visual –

There are several services out there that will take an RSS feed and push the content into an authorized twitter account. We will use twitterfeed.com as our source and assume you’ve logged into the service.

Rick's RSS feed

Challenge no. 1: If you were to take the child user’s RSS feed directly from twitter.com (see image above for where it is, bottom of sidebar), twitterfeed will throw an error stating:

twitter does not allow posting of twitter feeds back to twitter. If you do have a particular need for this, please contact twitter at http://twitter.com/help.

Twitter will basically say, “not available.” Perhaps it’s coming as part of business account plans? In any case, it’s something to overcome, and we’ll need a proxy.

Challenge no. 2: RSS feeds from twitter take the form of [username]: [update], like this:

rthames: With tax revenues down, the city will cut transportation jobs, trim bus service and freeze employees’ pay. www.charlotteobserver.com

There’s a need to put in a prefix (such as “Via editor @”) to differentiate the update. The prefix of “Via editor” is easy, but the “@” will be hard because twitterfeed puts a trailing space at the end of its prefix ability.

You can skip the steps below if you don’t care about the @ symbol being placed directly against the username to create the auto-link twitter generates.

The Fix

There may be more eloquent solutions, but sometimes what you know is best. For a savvy internet publisher, the below should take about 15 minutes.

1. First, you’ll need to download Wordpress and go through the 5-minute install.

2. Download the FeedWordPress plug-in and install in the /wp-content/plugins directory.

3. Activate the plug-in in the Wordpress UI.

4. Grab the twitter RSS feed — the twitter.com one that doesn’t work at twitterfeed — and add it to the syndicated feeds. Example: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/15165549.rss Bonus: If you want to do this for multiple feeds, make sure to categorize the feed with a unique username to take advantage of a category-specific Wordpress RSS feed later.

5. Make sure you update the feed so your new blog so that it has the RSS content now syndicated within. You’ve solved Challenge no. 1 because we’ll have a new RSS feed originating from your own blog/category. If you don’t care about the “@” symbol, insert the new feed into twitterfeed with your chosen variables and you’re finished.

6. If you care about the “@” symbol — which I do — you need to modify your RSS template to add this character. Under /wp-includes/feed-rss2.php, you’ll have to add the symbol on lines 36 and 49, after