How to aggregate multiple Flickr RSS feeds into a single feed for your Twitter stream
This simple technique works with any RSS feeds but I use it to follow my favourite photographers on Flickr. I get a Twitter notification whenever one of my Flickr contacts posts a photo, the tweet includes a link to the Flickr image page.
It is possible to send an RSS feed to your Twitter stream with Twitterfeed but as Aliza Sherman points out you get a more flexible service with dlvr.it, it's a simple matter to send an RSS feed using dlvr.it - just paste the RSS address and configure a few basic settings.
You can subscribe to a Flickr photographer's RSS feed in the normal way and you can send that feed to your Twitter stream using dlvr.it but it's time-consuming to repeat the process for each RSS stream that you want to follow. The solution is to create a feed bundle in Google Reader:
- Assemble the feeds you want into a single folder within Google Reader.
- Hover over the folder name and use the drop down menu to select 'create bundle', follow the instructions.
- Now in Google Reader select Your stuff > shared items, you can see that you are sharing your new bundle.
- Now open your shared bundle: the easiest way to do this seems to be to select 'send to > Twitter', then go to your Twitter page and click on the link to open your shared bundle page. Here's the bundle of Flickr feeds that I created.
- On the page there will be an Atom feed link... copy the link and paste it into dlvr.it, follow the instructions.
- Dlvr.it gives you options to include the title of the post and body text as well as a prefix of suffix. For a Flickr bundle you should include both title and body so that the resulting tweet will be something like "Image title: Photographer Name posted a photo: image description http://dlvr.it/457Dv #flickr" (I added the #flickr hashtag as a suffix).
I guess Flickr will enable integration with Twitter and other social services at some point, but until they do this is a nice way to receive Flickr update tweets.


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