12 July 2009, 18:56

I made a page on my personal Mahara Wiki page that gives detailed instructions for using this plugin/extension.  Basically it's a modified version of the existing 'External Feed' blocktype.  I modified it for specific use of Twitter feeds.  Let me know what you guys think!  Follow the link below to go to my Mahara Wiki page.

http://wiki.mahara.org/User:Dvarney

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David Varney
Celeritas Interactive Media
CeleritasDesign.com 

13 July 2009, 0:50

Hi David,

I've installed this plugin and taken it for a spin. I like the look of it, it's kept to the externalfeed structure as far as I can tell and installed fine on my 1.1 STABLE branch. I have some suggestions too which I think would put some polish on this plugin.

1. If the plugin could accept http://twitter.com/username URLs then find the feed link automatically that would be cooler. I've talked to Nigel about this and he says the ability to find an RSS feed in a web page is something we should have in mahara.
2. I think the 'Twitter updates from' line can be removed without losing any information visually. It could be hidden to still make the block accessible or that text embedded in the image as an alt?
3. I think it'd be good to strip out the username part of 'username: tweet'.
4. Instead of an expanded view (since tweets can't really expand that much) you could have an alternate view that, instead of linking to the tweet itself preserves the links of the tweet (so @username links are kept as links to that user on twitter

Anyway, I'm keen to hear your thoughts on my thoughts. 

15 July 2009, 18:40

I've been looking more at adding the rss functionality and I've found the twitter API makes this very easy:

You can provide a URL in the format:  http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/{username}.xml and it will give you a different RSS feed for that user which looks like it could be better for what we're doing.

More docs here:  http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-statuses-user_timeline

I'm still looking at the RSS grabber though for sites that aren't twitter, there seem to be a few of them out there. 

16 July 2009, 17:35

Hi David - I've seen it in action, and it looks good!

Ben has some good feedback that will help it even further. I reckon you should add a page under  http://wiki.mahara.org/Plugins for it . And maybe, if you're happy with it, we could take it into the Mahara core!

15 September 2009, 19:30

Hi Dave

I am interested in finding out more about this plugin  - as quite a few people use twitter on our site.

It is possible to add a twitter URL into a RSS block in Mahara  - does this plugin let you select the format and content ?

15 September 2009, 22:42

16 September 2009, 0:00

Thanks for replying - if something more was required to be done would the best way to do this would be to use the Twitter API so you could do something like link to Twitter friends in Mahara.

I am trying to think of something useful but not sure yet on what the possibilities are.

17 September 2009, 19:03

The problem  with using twitter in RSS feeds is that this only works for tweets that are made public.

This limits what could be posted in twitter that could be used in a portfolio view.

To display RSS feed in a private tweet use the following format for the URL

http://username:[email protected]/twitter feed URL

The good thing is that this URL is not visible in the view  and allows you to choose who has access to your tweets.

15 February 2010, 0:29

Hi David

 Any Progress with your Twitter Feed so far? Is there a new updated version available?

 Andi