Twitterfeed

So I walk in to work this morning, and am told that the last couple of News stories that we posted haven’t been auto-tweeted on to Twitter. We use Twitterfeed to pick up our RSS feeds and tweet it to our twitter account @lsbu, but it seems to have failed to do this for some unknown reason. Having checked our RSS feeds and Twitterfeed settings everything seemed to be working fine. So had to turn to the ever helpful Mario Menti (@mario) founder of Twitterfeed:

“If you select to post the item links to twitter (in the twitterfeed options), twitterfeed checks if it has perviously posted an item to your account with the same link, and if so, won’t post it again.
There’s 2 ways around this: either untick the “include link” option in twitterfeed for this feed (the link isn’t very useful if it’s the same for every post anyway), or else – preferably, but maybe a bit harder – change your feed so the link on each item actually points to this link, rather than to the blog generally. Then, since every link will be different, twitterfeed should post new items.”

So I doublechecked our RSS feed and noted that the ids used to identify the stories in the hyperlink were not unique and were already used in hyperlinks for older stories hence breaking Twitterfeed’s policy of not tweeting the same link twice. A quick correction of this by adding the date of posting to the hyperlink id, made it unique and Twitterfeed was more than happy to tweet out the stories and my world once again became a happy place.