Inline Tweeting: Post links to your twitter profile from Firefox using delicious + twitterfeed

admin — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 01:15:34 +0000

I’m always on the look out for productivity hacks. Twitter has become a part of my daily routine and something that if not managed correctly can hog your time and attention. Using some Web 2.0 applications, I’ve come up with a process to help improve your productivity for tweeting links, without having to leave your browser – I like to call it, “inline tweeting”

This system will improve your Twitter productivity:

A lot of tweets from the people I’m following contain a link. Using this process you will save time in posting your links without having to open twitter.com or your desktop twitter application. Tagging with delicious will automatically grab the page title and the links saving you time in writing your message & shortening the URL
By using twitter I find that I use my RSS readers a lot less. This process forces me to keep a good library of bookmarks in delicious which I can then read on my iPhone in Google Reader
You don’t have to have twitter.com or any twitter app open allowing you to tweet whilst browsing without the distraction from other messages on twitter

Want to begin inline tweeting? Here’s the step-by-step process:

Step 1: Sign-up for Del.icio.us

Create a delicious account – link to sign up page

Step 2: Install the Delicious Firefox add-on

During the signup process, if you didnt install the del.icio.us Firefox add-on you can download it here

Step 3: Tagging your bookmarks

When tagging a bookmark create a unique tag that will be used for posting that bookmark to Twitter – I use tweet as my tag.
Log-in to your delicious account at delicious.com
Click on your unique tag, in my case the tag “tweet”
Click on “RSS Feed for these bookmarks”. This will open the RSS feed for all bookmarks tagged “tweet”. The URL of this RSS feed is important and will need to be pasted in to twitterfeed in the next step.

Step 4: Setup your Twitterfeed

Visit twitterfeed.com
Login using your preferred method
Go to Create new twitter feed
Type in your twitter username and password
In the field, RSS Feed URL: paste in the URL of the RSS feed for your “tweet” tag from Step 3
Change the update frequency to every 30 minutes, and to pust up to 5 new updates each time.
On the Include… dropdown menu, change it to “title only”

Once filled in, click “Create” and it will be setup!

Now that it’s setup, do some tagging in Firefox with the tag “tweet” and confirm they post to your Twitter account (Note: It takes about 1 hour for the first tweet to appear on your twitter profile)

Tips:

You can automatically post to multiple twitter accounts by having a tag used specifically for each Twitter account. eg: tweetaccount1 & tweetaccount2 both producing their own unique RSS feed which can then be setup in twitterfeed.
You can have Twitterfeed automatically shorten your URL’s using bit.ly (my preferred URL shortening service) by changing it to “Shorten link through bit.ly”.