A Yahoo Pipe to add hyperlinks to your Twitter favorites
I often use to favor certain tweets in order to read the links in them at a later moment. To do so I added the RSS feed of my Twitter Favorites to NetNewsWire. Unfortunately the items in the RSS feed consist of plain text linking to the corresponding status page on Twitter.
Some time ago I used Yahoo Pipes to create a RSS feed that linkifies my Twitter Favorites RSS feed. Yesterday I made this a bit better:
- It tries to find all links by using a simple regex. I know this is a hard problem (see 1, 2, 3) but I haven’t noticed it missing a link yet
- It uses the first link found as the link on the RSS item, making it possible to directly open what the tweet is about in one click
- It adds a ★ that links to the corresponding status page on Twitter, like Daring Fireball does when he’s mostly quoting another article
- It adds links to usernames and hashtags
The only problem with the RSS feed is that it needs your Twitter User ID, not your Username, to work. This can be found by going to twitter.com while logged in and looking for the RSS feed icon. When hovering over it, you’ll see it linking to something like http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/659313.rss. In my case my User ID is 659313.
You can add the RSS feed of the Yahoo Pipe directly by adding http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=1fd5eef468624286c4bfbbe6192ac9c9&_render=rss&user_id=659313 to your RSS reader. You’ll only need to change the User ID into your own.
I did find a Yahoo Pipe by earth2marsh that is able to use your Username instead of the User ID. It directly uses Twitters API instead of the RSS feed and a bit of YQL to construct an RSS feed of your Twitter Favorites, including avatars. Unfortunately it does not linkify the text. Perhaps I should combine both feeds someday
