I am just about to set live a change that supports using GUIDs instead of pubDates to determine if an item is new. This is useful for cases where a feed contains GUIDs but no publish dates, or where publish dates are erratic (as an example, many feeds created with tools like Yahoo! Pipes may have odd publish dates that cause problems with twitterfeed posting to them to twitter).

A few (important) notes:

Any problems, please report them at http://getsatisfaction.com/twitterfeed

twitterfeed has so far always used TinyURL for URL shortening. A number of people have asked for support for alternative URL shorteners, as some of them contain additional features like stats and tracking.

The two alternatives mentioned/requested in the GetSatisfaction forums were tweetburner/twurl and SnipURL/snipr.

So, as of today, twitterfeed allows you to select these as alternatives to TinyURL. The default setting for any existing twitter feeds is still TinyURL, but you can edit this on a per-feed basis from within “my feeds”.

As ever, please let me know if you find any problems related to this or any other aspect of the twitterfeed service. The best place to share these is at GetSatisfaction.

The Prime Minister’s Office in 10 Downing Street is now running an official twitter channel (this is no April fool’s joke, by the way!), using a mixture of manual posts/replies and automated posts using twitterfeed.com. It’s apparently run by the Prime Minister’s Digital Communications team. How cool is that?  

Bryce has a very cool post on how he’s using Yahoo! Pipes and twitterfeed to re-tweet his favourite posts to his twitter stream. Enjoy!

Just a quick note to say that twitterfeed is mashup of the day today - a leap day, so bound to be extra-special - at mashupawards.com: http://mashupawards.com/twitterfeed/  Thanks!  

Since twitterfeed.com supports the new OpenID 2.0 standard, Yahoo! users can now log into twitterfeed.com with their existing Yahoo! ID. All you need to do is to enable your account for OpenID at http://openid.yahoo.com. Once that’s done, you can just enter “yahoo.com” into any OpenID 2.0 enabled site, and you’re logged in.

To make it even easier, the twitterfeed login page even  has a button that logs you straight in with your OpenID-enabled Yahoo username.

… it seems that my hosting provider is continuing to have problems, and after twitterfeed was up most of today, it’s currently unreachable again. This is annoying at the very least, and I’ll try and figure out what is going on (this particular provider has been extremely reliable for years with a number of my sites, so I’d be very reluctant to switch, but it would be good to know the cause of the issues).

I’ll let you know when things are back again..

Apologies for the recent twitterfeed downtime - first I upgraded to rails 2.0.2 and the latest ruby-openid gem, which caused a few unforeseen problems, and once that was all sorted out, my hosting provider had a problem with my machine which meant copying all data off that server and remounting elsewhere, so twitterfeed was offline for all of yesterday.

It’s back now (touch wood), and hopefully will continue to be

If anyone see any issues or problems, please let me know!

One of the most frequent questions I get is related to forgotten OpenID URLs. People log into twitterfeed, and a few months later want to tweak their settings, but can’t remember the OpenID URL they used to log in.

To avoid this from happening (and to save myself some manual work), twitterfeed now has a “Forgot your OpenID URL?” link on the login page. If you provide us with the twitter username and password you were using to post your feeds to, it will display the matching OpenID URL you used when creating the feed.

Good news for anyone worried about entering their twitter username/password unencrypted: twitterfeed now uses SSL on the pages where you enter your twitter account info.

Eventually, once twitter starts supporting API authentication officially (see http://twitter.com/oauth), I’m planning to migrate twitterfeed to use oAuth also, doing away with the need for anyone having to enter twitter passwords. But in the meantime, at least you’ll know that the pages where you do so are encrypted.

I should say a big “thank you” to all the kind twitterfeed supporters who have donated money, making developments like these possible (as well as contributing to the continuing running of the site). And thank to Josh, who prompted me into setting it up (and pointed me to the affordable GoDaddy SSL Certificates).