New Twitter Handling
Last week, the inevitable happened.
A free service we were using as a band-aid to feed our news to twitter failed. And because free means no
The twitterfeed.com service, which is a really neat concept for a variety of ways but also controversial (the thought is with no human behind service, it’s impersonal), provided our team the ability to accomplish two distinct tasks:
- Feed our news into various twitter accounts (for us, aka “Feed”).
- Provide a key component for our desire to feed individual reporter/editor accounts into our main @theobserver twitter account, as I’ve posted about before (for us, aka “By”).
We’d used twitterfeed because it’s free, and — just being honest here — I could do the set-up and minimal code for the two different top-level requirements. Our developers have plenty to do, so this previous solution needed to be easy and quick.
Yet as we took the service in-house, we decided to make the service meet other requirements that twitterfeed could not. These included two biggies for us:
- Multiple feeds must be able to feed the same account without duplicating stories.
- We must be able to pre-pend to any post with either [news], by: , or a TBD new pre-pend. Twitterfeed can do this, but not in the efficient way we wanted or meeting the previous bullet.
- We wanted updates to be more in real-time than the twitterfeed’s limit of every 30 minutes. News wants to be fast, and for things like scores, the delay hurt.
The changes will be live this week, and Dave said he may post the code for others in McClatchy (and the web-o-sphere) to use.
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droberts
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Jason
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Ian