@drudgerep - New Drudge Report Twitter Feed
February 11, 2010
I know others have created a twitter feed for the Drudge Report, but most of them were filled with bugs and I figured I would make a clean cut easy way for a reliable Drudge Report Twitter Feed located at http://twitter.com/drudgerep . Since the election season is around the corner, generally speaking that site tends to get more traffic and is useful, what’s not useful is being forced to visit the site every 10 minutes to find out what is breaking. So a Twitter feed is easy enough right?
Well it wasn’t that easy… See Matt Drudge is still posting to that site the same way he did in 1996, a single html file that it appears he manually FTP’s up. This isn’t wordpress or a CMS by any modern definition. Though he may have been the first Political Blogger, he’s clearly not caring about any modern conveniences that blogging now has.
That means that there is NO RSS feed, no Atom feed, no modern social media tools.
So I decided to start to code a scraper, a script that will literally just go though the HTML every x minutes and find the new links, then post them into an RSS feed.
Then I found a site that did this already.
http://www.drudgereportfeed.com/ The feed appears to then use a a Google owned product called FeedBurner.com .. fair enough. But now I have working RSS feed, but now I must take that RSS feed to put it into Twitter.
So I started reading into the Twitter API information to build a script that would allow for this.
I then found a site called twitterfeed.com and plugged in the credentials to the new twitter feed that I created, and working with Twitter’s API it worked. But I had to specify a URL shortner as most of the URLs that Matt posts are 1.5 million characters long.
I figured I would use bit.ly since it’s owned by the same investment company twitter is.
So after that was complete, I then realised.. I had to do zero coding and now I have a reliable twitter feed that updates almost in real time.
I love the Internet.
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