Friday, June 14, 2013

Twitter RSS feeds R.I.P

Twitter have turned off their support for RSS feeds in the last few days. This means I have no way of keeping up with the various Mogwai-related Twitter accounts - there are workarounds, but I don't have time to set those up at present.

If you use Twitter and have time to keep up with Mogwai on there, I'd recommend doing so as that's where they currently announce most of their activities. The rest of us will have to make do with the sporadic website updates, and hope that Facebook don't turn off their RSS feeds in the near future.

It's likely that this blog will be updated even less frequently than it has been recently, until I get time to work out a convenient way to get this info to come to me rather than having to hunt for it.

I'm seriously considering whether Brightlight needs a news function any more. When Tom started the site in 1998, there was a definite 'gap in the market' - there was an active exchange of information about the band on email groups but no website to back this up. Obviously the situation now is entirely different, as is my domestic and work situation, and it's been increasingly noticeable that Brightlight is not breaking news in the way we once did.

Temporary hiatus or longer break? We'll see.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sad to hear. You are the best info spot on Mogwai in the web.

Simon said...

Just tried creating a list to see if this would be a viable alternative (I've never bothered using lists in Twitter before), but it doesn't seem to display all tweets by the user(s).

Rob said...

Thanks for your attempts to help out!

markus said...

Rob, the new twitter feed format is "json". There are several sites that offer free conversion from json to rss (e.g. http://www.twitter-rss.com/).

http://www.twitter-rss.com/user_timeline.php?screen_name=rbstrng

Of course you'd depend on another third party provider who could quit their services without prior notice. But, at least for the time being, this is probably better than nothing?

Rob said...

Thanks Markus - seems to be working perfectly.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for all your hard work Rob (and team).

Unknown said...

Check out the Tweetledee project on GitHub. It supports user timelines, user favorites, tweet search, and home timeline RSS feeds (and JSON). I am going to release user list feed files this week.

Full documentation is available here:
http://chrissimpkins.github.io/tweetledee

Hope that it helps! Feel free to let me know if you have any questions (@pixsied on Twitter)

Best,
Chris

Rob said...

Thanks Chris, your suggestion is appreciated.

A quick read suggests that's going to be half a day's work for me to figure out, so it'll have to go on the back burner for now.

Rob said...
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